Product Innovation

Assignment:

Product Innovation (PIN)

Value Proposition/Innovation

"The Country Experience"

By:

Paul Rennie

TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE

1. Executive Summary 3

2. Justification and rationale 4

3. Research Methodology 5

3.1 Pre Situation 5

3.2 Findings-SWOT Analysis 6

4. Post Evaluation 8

4.1 Project Implementation 8

5 Project Management Techniques 12

5.1 Change Management 13

6. Discussion and Implications 14

7, Conclusion 19

8, References 22

9. Annexure A, B (Questionnaires) 23-28

Executive Summary

Organisations today need to recognise the importance of information and innovation as the key drivers to achieve long term, sustainable competitive advantage. With the onslaught of globalisation and regionalisation, we can no longer rely on the past experiences to ensure we remain ahead of the pack and therefore need to place more emphasis on an organisational development strategy which includes project innovation management to counteract the barriers of the traditional economy. Creativity is becoming more popular globally as an organisational development technique that will produce creative decision making and knowledge leadership, thereby ensuring that today's knowledge workers can contribute more significantly to the success of organisations and ultimately also ensure their own success. Converting information into knowledge and translating this into opportunities is the new role of the knowledge worker, thus creating more value for businesses.

2.Justification and Rationale

In today's corporate environment the need to excel and perform way beyond the levels experienced in previous years is apparent and one needs to take cognisance of the fact that markets demand ever increasing service levels, wider product ranges and the benefits attached to these products, not to mention consistency and increasing quality to match the price. Especially in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) arena, we find ongoing competition and the fight to be the number one brand in the market place.

This ongoing scramble results in elevated levels of output required by employees of many businesses and thereby also results in the exploitation of human capital. Business focuses on productivity and results and is volume driven at almost any cost. The human resource factor is often overlooked and the results can be detrimental to an organisation.

In order to create a foundation for innovation and creativity and thereby build a knowledge economy, managers in organisations need to understand and apply ways and means to extract value from the resources within their businesses and thereby further add to the knowledge economy and competitive advantage they pursue. Part of this process is the need to establish a sense of teamwork and collaborative thinking in the minds of the workers. By doing this and in getting the workers to understand the methodologies behind creativity and innovation, managers can create a new knowledge economy and grow businesses without further capital investment or cost. "Ensuring that newness of ideas as a criterion and resultant solutions to ideas are par for the course, creates fluency and implies some novelty to the thinker." (Steyn, C.S. 2006)

Such is the thinking behind this report. The organisation in review here is SAB Ltd and moreover ABI, the soft drink division of SAB. Traditionally, the above task was that of those who sat in the ivory towers of a typical head office and merely delegated the various tasks to be carried out by the workers on grass roots level. The result here is that numerous issues arise and when not treated, cause untold dissatisfaction among the workforce resulting in a negative impact on productivity and customer service.

My idea is to create a platform upon which to enable staff to grow and experience the full potential of interacting with the rest of the workforce on a level where openness to influence, commitment to the success of others, willingness to acknowledge contributions to problems, personal accountability and originality and trust are fundamental to ensuring that we harness the combined energies and rich resources that lie within our own people, and thereby create the new knowledge economy on which we create a sustainable competitive advantage. This platform needs to be sustainable and epistemic thereby connecting decision makers with the data dispersed across the enterprise that empowers users with the tools to analyze the data on-the-fly, and enables users to work with operational systems in real-time. (Mikael SundstrÐ"¶m, 2000).

Finding the important information and transforming it into truly original knowledge work is the phenomenon of creating new knowledge from old information and finding new applications for it." (Steyn, C.S. 2006)

3.Research Methodology

3.1Pre Situation

ABI is a large multinational with a staff compliment in excess of 4000. To assume that due to its mere magnitude, all is well and due to that fact that they distribute the world's best known brands would be gross negligence. The staff too has, as with any other company, a number of issues which are currently not addressed satisfactorily and also not within the time frame to ensure a speedy result which is acceptable and or implementable.

Decision making is controlled by management, as and when they feel this is required. There is no system of collaboration or joint idea finding and solution seeking. Staff feel undermined and are merely pawns on a chess board, moving to and when told by their leader, even if they feel this will not address the problem