Managing Innovation at Nypro - Assignment Example

A1) Nypro primarily has a focus on how entrepreneurship should be encouraged within the organization, for the reason that people with entrepreneurial spirit tend to leave and set up their own businesses. Such people can be beneficial to this organization because they believe in innovation and can identify opportunities faster than those who are not entrepreneurial by nature. The organization believes that such people need to be retained and nurtured through various programs and features so that they continue to innovate and grow.

When Nypro had found itself in a plateau a few years ago, where revenues were limited, it had witnessed that several people had resigned and left the organization. As a result, the management decided to implement various programs that would help entrepreneurial people to stay within the organization and help it to innovate. Competitive nature is fostered within Nypro in order to build and maintain the innovative streak within the organization. A2) Lankton introduced a stock based program that helps in rewarding employees who help innovate successfully and help identify successful business opportunities.

To be part of this program, employees are selected on the basis of number of years they have served within the organization, their salary level, and level of performance. The number of these stock holders in the program remained to be about a 100 based on various elements like attrition and retirement. A pool of about 400 people is shortlisted each year out of which 6-8 are selected for this program. After that, groups are formulated and these groups wor to innovate within the organization facing rivalry amongst each other.

This rivalry was called by one of the employees as progress through conflict. This spirit of competition is fostered by Lankton to enable the organization to grow through exploration of opportunities and play on innovation. The second step that was taken up was that each plant for Nypro was organized like it was a separate company and with a separate board of directors that were managers from other parts of the plant or other plants altogether. This way internal management of innovation takes place as ideas are shared and people work as if they were working on various joint ventures.

Further on, team based structures are implemented for continuous improvement in order for more and more opportunities to be explored. A3) The step wise process that would be followed to take the NovaPlast decision would be: 1. Calculate the costs associated with working with the NovaPlast as to what will be incurred as an investment at the beginning of the project 2. Calculate the profits associated with the project as to the benefits that will be derived in monetary terms for the first two options that the management is thinking about. 3. Evaluate the net present value of the profits for each against the costs incurred at the beginning of the project 4.

Calculate the cost and benefits (profits) associated with the project if NovaPlast is not used – which is then considered as the third option by the management. Once the above steps have been taken, the next step would be to evaluate the net profit associated with each option. The one option that has the most profit with respect to time will be the option chosen to be implemented within Nypro.