INTRODUCTION

Drucker (1973, p. 43) observes that ‘management always has to consider both the present and the future; both the short run and the long run’. In the present, the manager must keep the enterprise performing by ensuring that day-to-day operations are successfully carried out. Achieving this will involve the kinds of relatively minor modifications that are made in response to changing circumstances or feedback from customers so as to keep the LTO in a state of productive equilibrium.

A manager also has to redirect resources from areas of low or diminishing returns to areas of high or rising results. In other words, the manager has to be concerned with the future, or, in Drucker’s words, the manager ‘has to create tomorrow’ (Drucker, 1973, p. 45). Implicit in this task is managing change and innovation on a scale which goes beyond maintaining a steady state. Such major change has been termed a ‘punctuation’ in the ‘punctuated equilibrium’ model of change (see p. 239).

In fact, change, as such, happens, regardless of managerial intervention. Any difference between a state of affairs at different times can be thought of as change. Innovation, by contrast, has been defined by Audrey Nichols (1983, p. 4) as

The difference between change and innovation is important, although the terms are often used interchangeably, with ‘change management’ being applied to implementing innovation in the sense defined by Nichols, and ‘diffusion of innovation’ to the way in which innovations are spread and adopted. In this chapter, ‘change’ will be used to refer to forces which can impact on an organization, while ‘managing innovation’ will be concerned with the introduction of new ideas and practices.