Creativity and Innovation

1) .The idea for Canva has emerged by Melanie Perkins the graphic design teacher at the university as she found the students learning the basics. She began to implement her ideas with the assistance of Cliff Obrecht the co-founder of the Canva business to launch Fusion Books. These tools are online designing tools that enable the students and teachers to create their own yearbooks. Their technology started to spread more broadly, which encouraged the two founders to launch the Canva business with Cameron Adams the tech co-founder. The business is based in Sydney, it has become Australia’s unicorn representing the latest technology with a $US1 billion value of operations. The innovation of Canva assisted in its rapid growth and profit increase (The Sydney Morning Herald, 2018). A problem that faces Canva from the customer side is the failure to print design test. The professionals argue that the tools are useful only to beginners. It does not offer a learning curve (Tattersfield, 2014). Regarding the competition, the major competitors of Canvas are the two design software companies Microsoft and Adobe (Body, 2018).

Creativity represents the people’s ability to generate new and useful ideas to satisfy a need. Idea generation comes from anywhere, they could be a result of observation, frustration, questions or dreams and serendipity (Shewfelt, 2012). Melanie Perkins could turn her design start-up into a business that worth Billion dollars. The business is profitable and does not need money but it was very profitable. It helped its customers to build logos, presentations and banners. The original Canva tool is free, the new features meet the demand of power users and companies to enhance their capabilities and productivity. It transforms the ways companies are working in a competitive way (The Sydney Morning Herald, 2018).

2).The open innovation life cycle includes three main stages of preparation, operation/implementation and termination. The preparation stage involves the firm level strategies, including the choices of firm-specific knowledge creation mechanisms. The operation/implementation stage involves the absorptive capacities of individuals, the intellectual property secrecy and the networking competencies. Finally, the termination stage is reached when the innovation activities result in less control and increased cost of coordination (Bican, Guderian, & Ringbeck, 2017).

The organization’s readiness represents its ability successfully implement an organization or program. It includes proper leadership to support the organizational readiness, its culture of learning and improvement, skills and resources. Organizational readiness for innovation requires capacity planning, recognizing the core skills, core competencies, the industry requirements, the tools required for learning and consumer practice improvement (Morariu, 2012).

The Open Innovation Life Cycle

3).The organizational leadership is necessary to influence innovation and the frequency of innovative activities. Leadership exists prior to innovation in the organization. It is critical to strategy development, implementation as well and the organizational success in the marketplace. Leadership plays an important role in matching the organizational innovation activates with the organization performance in the marketplace. The existence of the proper leadership style within the organization is important to facilitate innovation. Conflicts at the workplace might occur due to cultural differences and represent a barrier to innovation. As culture involves the beliefs, values and rituals that affect the peoples’ interests. Conflict in interests causes problems. Strong leadership is required to facilitate communication among team members with different interests. Also, it could be more appropriate for societies that hierarchy. Strong leadership is capable of providing the strategic fit for the innovative strategy to lead to the innovation success (Anning-Dorson, Odoom, Acheampong, & Tweneboah-Koduah, 2017).

4).The innovation principles could be selected based on their importance and the degree of success they could lead the innovative organization to reach. They could be discussed according to Ramadani & Gerguri (2011), as follows:

• The entrepreneur has to produce a new product that could be easily sold: The introduction of a new good has to be new to the market and fulfills a certain need. In the case of Canva company, Melanie Perkins could fill a customer need for an easy to use tool. The product features enhanced its ability to spread all over the world not only the Australian market (Fitzsimmons, 2018).
• The introduction of a new method of production: The innovation should offer a new production scheme that increases output from the existing inputs or introduces new inputs. The Canva company offered a new free DIY online design tool. It is an easy to use tool as most of the tools in the market are complicated or very expensive (Body, 2018).
• The opening of a new market: The innovative product can offer the chance to be sold in new markets or increase the number of customers. Canva could reach its product to 350 thousand designers each month that was increased to 3 million per month after eight months. After 52 months, Canva platform is handling 34 million designers each month (Body, 2018).
• The conquest of a new source of supply of raw materials: The entrepreneur has to find an appropriate source of inputs to serve for the production of the new products. Canva online service has more than 10 million photos uploaded by users and stock images that the user can select from (Ramli, 2018).
• The carrying out of the new organization of any industry: The introduction of an innovative product represents an entrance of the entrepreneur in almost a monopoly market. The Canva has entered a market mainly dominated by Microsoft and Adobe companies and it could gain a large market segmentation (Body, 2018).

5).A process of idea generation: A successful idea generator is the one can select the really good idea from many other ideas. In order to generate a good idea, important questions should be asked, according to Shewfelt (2012), as follows;

• Is it an exciting idea?
• Could it be transformed into an achievable objective?
• Could these ideas be achieved in a realistic time frame?
• Do the organizational capabilities enough to fulfill this idea?

A process of idea evaluation: Evaluation of the idea is very important to an innovative enterprise. The evaluation process could be done according to Baumgartner (2018) as follows:

• Identification of the idea that most likely to succeed as an organizational innovation.
• Assure that the complex idea is viewed by experienced people as a good one and what might go wrong.
• Seek the assistance of supervisors to persuade the top management and the stakeholders with the idea and obtain the required budget.
• Improve the idea through the identification of potential implementation problems and prepare for the suitable reaction.

References:

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