Important trends in innovation in IT are identified and their implications for innovation management explored. Major topics include: drivers of innovation; the trend to open information (“open source”) rather than protected intellectual property; and distribution of innovation over many independent but collaborating actors.
students will be able to identify and analyse an emerging technology and write a detailed evaluation of the impact of this technology on existing business practices.

Week 1: Introductions

1. Introduction to IT Innovations

Levels of Involvement

• Society, country or world
  • How the innovation system works
  • How technology cycles work
  • Drawn mostly from economics and sociology
• Organisation
  • How organisations can adopt innovations
  • How organisations can produce innovations
  • Drawn mostly from business studies, technology management and IT
• Individual or team
  • How individuals can drive innovation
  • Drawn mostly from entrepreneurship and case studies

Relevance to IT careers

A. Enterprise IT

Understand IT innovations so you can analyse likely impact from new technologies and plan for their adoption

B. R&D of IT technologies

Understand IT innovations so you can lead the development of new technologies within an established organisation

C. IT start-up

Understand IT innovation so that you can create a software start-up company

2. Definition of Innovation

Innovation vs Invention

Innovation involves (1) a new idea that is (2) applied commercially – Schumpeter (1930s).

Definition of innovation

• Innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), process, new marketing method or a new organisational method in business practices, workplace organisation or external relations.
• So
  • Innovation is more than the generation of creative ideas
  • It is implementation of those ideas into a new business/ device/process/product
  • Innovation requires combining a creative idea with resources and expertise that make it possible to embody the creative idea in a useful form

3. The importance of innovation

Innovation as a “Creative Destruction”

Creative destruction – waves that restructure entire industries and markets in favors of those who grasp and adapt to technological changes faster.

Importance of Technological innovation

• Technological innovation:
  • Is often the most important competitive driver in many industries
  • Leads to improvements in productivity
  • Is strongly linked with improvements in Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
  • Is linked to improvements in standard of living

**Importance of innovation to a **Country

• “At the aggregate level, innovation leads to a more productive allocation of resources throughout the economy.
• Based on the concept of ‘creative destruction’ developed by Schumpeter, innovative cutting-edge firms (and their business models) enter markets and disrupt them forcing less productive models out.”

Innovation System

• We define an innovation system in this way:
• “An innovation system is an open network of organisations that interact with each other and operate within framework conditions that regulate their activities and interactions.
• The three components of the innovation system —
  • networks,
  • innovation activities and
  • framework conditions
• collectively function to produce and diffuse innovations that have, in aggregate, economic, social and/or environmental value.”

Innovation Cycle

Innovation active Businesses

• innovating businesses (includes businesses that introduced at least one type of innovation during the reference period)
• innovation-active businesses (includes businesses that undertook any innovative activity irrespective of whether the innovation was introduced, still in development or abandoned during the reference period).

Digital Maturity

Digital maturity refers to the combination of a company’s investment in technology-enabled initiatives meant to change how the company operates (its digital intensity) and its investment in the leadership capabilities needed to create digital transformation within the business.

Australia’s Opportunities and Challenges in the journey to 2030

• Technology will continue to transform our world
• Opportunities in the next decade will be amplified and accelerated by the ubiquity of technology in our lives, the pace of innovation, and the scale of adoption.
• Digital technologies will combine with asset-intensive domains like healthcare and agriculture to create more value for consumers, and new methods for competing.
• A suite of new digital technologies, such as machine learning, optimisation, artificial intelligence, sensing, robotics, visualisation and distributed ledgers, are opening new opportunities for innovation.

Five strategic policy imperatives

4. Tutorial #1 Importance of innovation to a Country

a) Read Section 5.8 of the 2016 report. It is important to note the roles of the Government in a Country’s innovation cycle. Study the cycle and look at the different roles of the Government. What are some of the ways that the Government can support innovation?

b) ‘Historically, publicly-funded research has been essential to a range of significant innovations that turned out to have large economic returns. Notable examples include aviation, nuclear energy, the internet, pharmaceuticals, GPS navigation, biotechnology, artificial intelligence and robotics**’. It is important to note that many of the given examples are technology (IT) innovations, e.g., Internet, GPS, AI and Robotics, and likely the others are enabled by these IT innovations. Why do you think these examples were publicly funded and not privately funded?

c) Read the summary of the Government’s role in Innovations from the Australia 2030 report, page 6. It presents the recommendations required for the government to facilitate innovation (recommendations 11 to 18). Choose two most effective recommendation from your perspective and explain your justification for the selection with examples (e.g. real cases or your experiences).