Factors that act as constraints on innovation in an organisation includes:
● Insufficient time: There is a lack of time in which to consider alternative
approaches to undertake work.
● Status quo: A traditional approach, an unwillingness of managers and
other staff to change the current way of doing things.
● Political problems: Battles over areas of responsibility and lack of
co-operation between different areas of the organisation.
● Evaluation pressure: The evaluation or feedback systems are perceived to
be inappropriate. The environment is focused on criticism and external
evaluation.
Two other areas should be included in the audit of the staff’s perceptions
on organisational climate:
1 Creativity: How creative is the organisation perceived to be overall?
2 Productivity: How productive is the organisation perceived to be?
● Metaphors
This audit is about innovation and it should therefore use proven cre-
ativity tools as part of the process. The second part of the evaluation of
the organisational climate uses the technique of metaphorical descrip-
tion (Morgan, 1993).
The power of the metaphor approach is that it can overcome the limita-
tions of literal language and describe far more complex relationships and
connections.
Individuals are asked to describe their organisation in terms of a
metaphor. For example: ‘This organisation is like a well-oiled machine, it
runs well and does not make too much noise’ or ‘This organisation is like
a ‘supertanker’ it takes a long time to change direction’. These metaphors
can then be analysed. They are likely to be either positive or negative
observations based around seven organisational practices:
1 Managerial skills
2 Organisational structure
3 Operations
4 Organisational life cycle
5 Strategic orientation
6 People orientation
7 Power orientation
This method allows a more rounded perspective of the organisational cli-
mate to emerge.
Hard measures
There is a range of hard measures that can be reviewed to establish the cur-
rent organisational performance in the areas of creativity and innovation:
● Rate of new product development in last 3 years. Davidson (1997) sug-
gests that both total innovation development and percentage success
rate are analysed (see Figure 5.3).
Internal analysis 97