Innovation, design and creativity are essential elements of a competitive advantage for company's services and products. This paper evaluates the impact that innovation, design, and creativity have on the strategy of Hewlett-Packard and Sprint. An assessment of the respective processes, products or services of these organizations is followed by a summary of the research and important findings in the conclusion.
Hewlett-Packard
Innovation and creativity are key aspects of Hewlett-Packard's track record of success. For instance, according to this company's promotional literature, "At HP, we live for the big idea, the next great discovery. 'Invent' is more than a word: it's who we are. Everything we do, we do to make technology more practical, usable, and valuable to our customers" (About HP, 2014, para. 3). Currently, Hewlett-Packard has more than 317,000 employees worldwide (Number of employees at Hewlett-Packard, 2014). An assessment of the various programs in place at Hewlett-Packard shows that the primary factors that facilitate innovation are an organizational culture that supports risk-taking, highly skilled staff, top-down support from management, an emphasis on multidisciplinary teams and using checkpoints to provide focal points for progress (Rivas & Gobeli, 2009).
The top management at Hewlett-Packard is responsible for managing innovation as well as establishing corporate strategy, allocating resources, sponsoring innovation projects, and making other important decisions for the company's direction (Rivas & Gobeli, 2009). In addition, multidisciplinary...
In addition, Rivas and Gobeli emphasize that at Hewlett-Packard, "Organizational culture refers to the extent of risk taking, willingness of others to extend extra effort, and the speed of decisions from others. Good informal communication channels are a critical success factor for innovation" (2009, p. 33).
The corporate culture at Hewlett-Packard rewards risk-taking and innovative thinking, but this creative culture did not just fall out of the sky but was rather the result of planning on the part of top management in response to the need to rapidly formulate software solutions across a wide range of departments (Mauzy & Harriman, 2009). According to Mauzy and Harriman (2009), the results of this planned corporate culture were significant. In this regard, Mauzy and Harriman note that the "principles of collaboration, feedback, and flexibility shaped a functioning creative climate and speed, productivity, and quality were a byproduct of the climate" (2009, p. 28). Likewise, Brown (2008) reports that at Hewlett-Packard, top management has "created a strategy to embed innovation, define roles and structures to support innovation engagement, understand the cultural and technical enablers of innovation, design ongoing communication and change management tactics, and evaluate key innovation measures" (p. 66). In sum, innovation and creativity are encouraged and…
