WorksheetsSET 1
Total questions: 74
Worksheet time: 42mins
Which of these would not normally be considered an incremental innovation?
An electric car
A low fat hamburger
Faster train journeys through better signalling
Chicken and onion flavoured potato snacks
Which of these innovations is a typical example of 'technology' or 'knowledge' push?
The Pilkington Float Glass process
Radar
Online banking
The Walkman personal hifi
YouTube and related video sharing internet sites
Innovation can only happen in the private sector because the public sector is not concerned with making profits or competition between firms.
True
False
Which of the following are factors often associated with successful innovating organizations? (Several choices may be correct.)
Large market share
Rich external linkages and networks
Large size
Supportive organizational climate with structures and incentives for innovation
Mechanisms for strategic selection of innovation options
Innovation can take many forms, all involving a change of some kind. Which of the following is NOT a form of innovation?
Product (or service) innovation - changes in what is offered to the world
Petroleum innovation - amount spent monthly by a business on its fuel costs
Process innovation - changes in the way offerings are created and delivered
Position innovation - changes in the context in which innovations are launched
Which of the following would you class as a radical innovation? (Several choices may be correct.)
The fibre tip pen
The electric light bulb
Which of the following is NOT a source of strategic advantage through innovation?
Complexity - offering something which others find it difficult to master
Legal protection of intellectual property - offering something which others cannot do unless they pay a licence or other fee
Scale of investment in R&D
Novelty in product or service offering - offering something no one else can
Peer-to-peer networking of the kind pioneered by Napster and now forming the basis of internet file sharing is an example of radical innovation.
True
False
Haagen Daz ice cream was created to open up a new market amongst adults for what had traditionally been seen as a children's food. This is an example of position innovation.
True
False
Innovation can take many forms. Running a hospital booking system which reduces patient waiting time is an example of which kind of innovation?
Process
Product
Marketing
Organizational
Which of the following is NOT an example of product innovation?
A new toothpaste
A new car design
A new version of the iPod
Computer-control of manufacturing operations
Successful innovation depends on having patent protection for the core idea.
True
False
Innovation always requires a radical flash of insight - a 'eureka!' moment.
True
False
Innovation success is directly linked to the size of investment in Research and Development (R&D).
True
False
Which of the following would not normally be considered a radical innovation?
The jet turbine engine
Integrated circuits
Increased colour choice on the Volkswagen 'Beetle' car
Antibiotic drugs
Social entrepreneurship does not concern itself with commercial questions.
True
False
There is no way to resolve the conflict between commercial business goals and those of social innovation.
True
False
The triple bottom line is ....
markings on a ship to show how heavily laden it is
a book-keeping convention to minimise accounting mistakes
an accounting system suitable for joint ventures between firms
a company reporting framework designed to take into account not just financial outcomes but also environmental and social performance
Which of the following statements about the 'bottom of the pyramid' market is not open to challenge?
The poor - 4 billion of them - earn less than $2/day
The poor have no purchasing power and do not represent a viable market
The poor are not brand-conscious
The poor are unable to use and not interested in advanced technology
Social innovation follows a different process to more commercial forms of innovation.
True
False
Which of the following is NOT a question for managing social entrepreneurship?
How do we find opportunities which deliver social as well as economic benefits?
How do we identify and engage a wide range of stakeholders – and understand and meet their very diverse expectations?
How do we mobilise resources across networks, how do we build coalitions of support for socially valuable ideas?
How do we patent and exploit emerging ideas?
Which of the following would NOT be considered a social entrepreneur?
Florence Nightingale
Muhammed Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank
Which of these is NOT a difference between social entrepreneurs and commercial entrepreneurs?
Social entrepreneurs are less concerned with independence and wealth, and more on social means and ends.
Social entrepreneurs are older than commercial entrepreneurs.
Social entrepreneurs place less emphasis on short-term growth and longer term harvesting of the venture, and more concern on long term change and enduring heritage.
Social entrepreneurs place less reliance on the firm and management team to execute the venture, and greater reliance on a network of stakeholders and resources to develop and deliver change.
Whilst empathy and a need for social justice may be necessary attributes of a social entrepreneur, they are not sufficient.
True
False
At each of the different stages of developing a new venture there are different significant challenges to overcome in order to make a successful transition to the next stage, what the researchers call "critical junctures". Which of the following is not normally such a critical transition?
Entrepreneurial commitment - persistence that bind the venture champion to the emerging business venture.
Venture credibility - of the venture team, key customers and other social capital and relationships.
Resource availability - access to the necessary financial resources.
Opportunity recognition - the ability to connect know-how to a commercial application.
Many dimensions of climate have been shown to influence innovation and entrepreneurship. Which of the following is not associated with innovation and entrepreneurship?
Time and space for generating new ideas.
Challenge and involvement to stimulate innovation.
Complete trust and lack of conflict.
Support for risk-taking and mistakes.
The Kirton Adapter-Innovator (KAI) scale is a psycho-metric approach for assessing the creativity of individuals. By a series of questions it seeks to identify an individual's attitudes towards originality, attention to detail and following rules. It seeks to differentiate "adaptive" from "innovative" styles. Which of the following is not true?
Adaptors focus on 'doing better'.
Adaptors create stretch solutions.
Innovators create more acceptable solutions.
Innovators reconstruct problems and assumptions.
Nelson & Winter develop the notion of organizational routines to help explain the behaviour and evolution of organizations. Which of the following is not a characteristic of routines:
Regular and predictable.
Collective, social and tacit.
Easily observable and measured.
Guide cognition, behaviour and performance.
The characteristics of a creative mind include:
Highly selective to data.
A fast, patterned response.
Willingness to suspend judgement.
Strong technical problem-solving capability.
Cognitive maps are a useful methods to encourage creativity and promote innovation. Which of the following is not a benefit of using cognitive maps?
Help to build consensus.
Make assumptions explicit.
Involve different stakeholders.
Three different aspects interact to promote or constrain creativity and innovation. Which of these is not a typical example?
Personality and cognitive style.
Process of creative problem-solving.
Tools and techniques for creativity.
Climate and culture.
The concept of "organizational slack" was developed to identify the difference between resources currently needed and the total resources available to an organization. Which of the following is not a characteristic of slack?
Organizational slack represents a static inefficiency.
Tends to optimize performance and increase efficiency.
Organizational slack can act as a dynamic shock absorber.
Tends to be self-reinforcing due to positive feedback.
A number of models of the creative process can be helpful to those who need to engage in innovation and entrepreneurship. One proven and practical process for challenging the way we perceive things includes three main stages. Which of these is not a stage in the process?
Raising the resources.
Understanding the opportunity.
Generating ideas.
Planning for action.
Organizational culture is important for innovation, but the concept of organizational climate is preferable. Which of the following is not true?
Climate is easier to assess and measure.
Culture cannot be directly observed.
Culture is more difficult to influence or change.
Climate explains more of the variance in performance.
Schein identifies a number of surface manifestations of organizational culture, most of which influence the degree and direction of innovation. Which of the following is not such a manifestation of culture?
Buildings, facilities and tools.
Rites and rituals.
Heros and role models.
Products and services.
The successful framing of problems or opportunities demands a number of disciplines. Which of the following is not desirable?
Consider many, varied alternatives.
Prioritize implementable solutions.
Craft specific but open problem statements.
Ignore limiting or restrictive criteria.
The cognitive abilities necessary for creativity include all but which of these characteristics?
Implementation and improvisation.
Intelligence to interpret and manipulate information.
Attention and perception to acquire and assess knowledge.
Venture capitalists assess business plans in different ways. However, which of the following would not be expected to encourage funding?
Personality and experience of the entrepreneurs.
Market and competitor assessment.
High-technology product or service.
Financial projections.
De Bono introduced the term lateral thinking to describe alternatives to logical thought, and has a long and distinguished career promoting applied creative thinking. Lateral thinking can be helped by a number of methods and techniques. Which of the following is not an example?
Distort the relationships or cause and effect.
Use brainstorming.
Remove or suspend an assumption or goal.
Use a metaphor or character.
Which of the following would NOT qualify as a discontinuous innovation?
Voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) telephony
Gene therapies for cancer treatment
Flat bed sleeping in business class airline cabins
The Internet
Which of the following is the discontinuous innovation?
Moving from four to six cylinder car engines
Moving from CD to DVD music and entertainment systems
Moving from small shops to self-service supermarkets
Moving from sugar to artificial sweeteners in food products
The fluid phase of innovation is a common term used to describe catalytic cracking in the oil industry.
True
False
Discontinuous shifts in technology always favor newcomer firms and established firms inevitably fail to take advantage of them.
True
False
A dominant design is one imposed by the largest firm in a sector on the rest of that industry.
True
False
Which of these innovations would not qualify as a dominant design?
The two-wheeled diamond frame bicycle
Direct online insurance via the Internet
The petrol driven internal combustion engine
The 5 string bass guitar
Within the transitional phase in Abernathy and Utterback's model, the predominant type of innovation is in major process innovations required by rising volume.
True
False
The “fluid” pattern in Abernathy and Utterback’s model is characterised by incremental product and process innovation.
True
False
The growing success of low cost airlines in the travel market is an example of disruptive innovation.
True
False
Discontinuous innovations are always associated with radical technological breakthroughs.
True
False
The use of tungsten filaments instead of carbon was a discontinuous innovation in the lighting industry.
True
False
The problem for the firms that found their marketplace disrupted in the computer disk drive industry wasn’t that they didn’t listen to customers but rather that they listened too well—to the wrong customers.
True
False
Which of the following are strategies for picking up weak signals about discontinuities?
Work with the “fuzzy front end”
Use futures techniques—scenarios, forecasting, etc.
Market research across existing customer groups
Probe and learn/ prototyping
Diversity—enabling odd connections to be made
Discontinuous innovations always come from outside the firm because of the difficulty of making them fit with the mainstream.
True
False
Which of the following statements would you expect to hear people saying in an organization that is well prepared to deal with discontinuous innovation?
We have alternative and parallel mechanisms for implementing and developing radical innovation projects that sit outside the “normal” rules and procedures.
We have mechanisms to bring in fresh perspectives—for example, recruiting from outside the industry
We have the largest R&D building in the country.
We always employ graduates from the same set of universities.
True
False
We have mechanisms for managing ideas that don’t fit our current business—for example, we license them out or spin them off.
True
False
We use some form of technology scanning/intelligence gathering—we have well-developed technology antennae.
True
False
Four factors have a major influence on the ability of a firm to develop and create value through innovation. Which of the following is not one of these factors?
Its ability to identify and exploit external sources of innovation, especially international networks.
Its ability to invest in basic science and technology.
Its power and market position within the international value chain, which in part defines the innovation-based opportunities and threats that it faces.
The national system of innovation in which the firm is embedded, and which in part defines its range of choices in dealing with opportunities and threats.
In his popular book, The World is Flat: The globalized world in the 21st century (Penguin, 2006), Thomas Friedman argues that developments in technology and trade, in particular information and communications technologies (ICTs), are spreading the benefits of globalization to the merging economies, promoting their development and growth. Which of the following is not true?
Technology and innovation are evenly distributed globally.
Technology and innovation are not easily transferred across regions or firms.
Different national contexts influence the ability of firms to absorb such technology and innovation.
The position of firms in international value chains can constrain their ability to exploit innovation.
Deciding where to locate and perform R&D depends on a number of factors. Which of the following is not a significant influence?
R&D supporting overseas production should be located close to that of overseas production.
R&D supporting existing businesses (i.e. products, processes, divisions) should be located in established divisions.
R&D supporting global products and services should be located overseas.
R&D supporting new businesses should initially be located in central laboratories, then transferred to divisions for exploitation.
Which of the following is not one of the main factors influencing the decision where to locate R&D globally?
The importance of external sources of technical and market knowledge, e.g. sources of technology, suppliers, and customers
The quality of the science and technology base
The importance and costs of internal transactions, e.g. between engineering and production
The cost and disruption of relocating key personnel to the chosen site
Firms have many reasons for monitoring and learning from the development of technological, production and organizational competencies of systems of innovation in other countries, and especially from those that are growing and strong. Which of the following is not a significant reason?
Which of the following is the least common method used by firms to learn about competitors’ innovations?
Licensing
Reverse engineering
Patent analysis
Publications
The national system of innovation in which a firm is embedded matters greatly, because it strongly influences both the direction and the vigour of its own innovative activities. This includes national market incentives and pressures to which firms have to respond. Which of the following is not a significant incentive?
Local production input prices, where international differences can help generate very different pressures for innovation
Local (private and public) investment activities, which create innovative opportunities for local suppliers
Local skills and knowledge
Local natural resources, which create opportunities for innovation in both upstream extraction and downstream processing
Firms’ innovative behaviours are strongly influenced by the competencies of their managers and the ways in which their performance is judged and rewarded (and punished). Methods of judgment and reward vary considerably among countries, according to their national systems of corporate governance: in other words, the systems for exercising and changing corporate ownership and control. Which of the following is not generally true?
In the Anglo-Saxon system, corporate ownership (shareholders) is separate from corporate control (managers).
In the Anglo-Saxon system, investors are slow to deal with poor investment choices.
In the Nippon–Rhineland system, a higher priority is given to investment than to returns to shareholders.
In the Nippon–Rhineland system, banks, suppliers and customers are more heavily locked into the firms in which they invest.
Technological leadership in firms does not necessarily translate itself into economic benefits. The capacity of the firm to appropriate the benefits of its investment in technology depends on its position. Which of the following is not relevant?
Innovation “leadership”—where firms aim at being first to market, based on technological leadership
Complementary assets or capabilities in marketing and distribution
Capacity to defend its advantage against imitators, for example, through standards or intellectual property
The learning curve in production generates both lower costs, and a particular and powerful form of accumulated and largely tacit knowledge
Firms in emerging economies may pursue different routes to upgrading through innovation. Which of the following is not a common pathway?
Prahalad and Hamel argue that the capacity to open new product markets requires distinctive core competencies, coupled with methods of corporate organization and evaluation that explicitly recognize the importance of these competencies. Which of the following is not true of core competencies?
Contribute to more than one core product, and to more than one business unit.
Suggests that large and multidivisional firms should be viewed as a collection of strategic business units.
Require focus: Companies are likely to lead in more than five or six core competencies.
Are supported by organizational competencies such communication, involvement, and a commitment to working across organisational boundaries.
David Teece and Gary Pisano integrate the various dimensions of innovation strategy into what they call the “dynamic capabilities” approach. This emphasizes the need to:
Manage strategically to adapt and re-configure capabilities
Make significant investments in emerging technological trajectories
Adopt a strategic position as market leader
Strategically anticipate future technologies and markets
The notions of core competence and dynamic capabilities are useful as they emphasize the importance of developing firm-level resources. However, there are a number of limitations to these approaches. Which of the following is not a significant limitation of the concepts?
A) Industries face differing potentials for technology-based diversification
B) Recommendations that firms should concentrate resources on a few distinctive world-beating technological competencies are misleading
C) Emphasizes the difficulty of capturing and transferring knowledge due to its tacit nature and context-specificity
D) More general enabling competencies for the coordination of changes in supply, production and distribution systems are necessary
A strategic goal is to get the right balance between exploitation of existing competencies and the exploitation and development of new competencies. Which of the following is not a critical issue in this respect?
The breadth and limits of management cognition that influence decision-making
The skills and experience of employees and other human capital
The internal and external relationships that influence access to information and knowledge
The vision, control and power of senior managers
There is no widely accepted definition or method of measurement of competencies. Which of the following statements is not true?
A) Functional measures might include capabilities in design, development or production.
B) Need to identify the range of disciplines or fields that contribute to a technology.
Fill in the blank: According to Tidd & Bessant, managing innovation needs to be based on specific strategic ________ targets.
technological
financial
marketing
operational
Fill in the blank: According to Tidd & Bessant, managing innovation needs to identify the new ________ that must be developed.
competencies
technologies
markets
products
