New Appoaches in the Process Industries: The Manufacturing Plant of the Future

6

Innovation and Change Management

Enterprises that endeavour to innovate new products, new management styles, new manufacturing methods are faced with a very challenging situation. At stake is the enterprise's profit and even its survival. Innovation also means change; change is a difficult and complex process that we will cover after first describing innovation. Globalization and competition from emerging countries has deeply shaken most industrial enterprises and forced them to adopt an “innovation” attitude to bring to markets new attractive and competitive products. Innovation differs from invention by the fact it brings profit to the company; it also creates value to the customer; but innovation is not limited to product design, it can also be applied to all company processes and especially to manufacturing operations. In this case innovation becomes complex due to the interaction between operators in place and external human sources and very often called for audits. Resistance to change is a human trail! In this chapter change management will be investigated and methods of implementtation explained.

6.1. Innovation

“We need to build a future in which our factories and workers are busy manufacturing in high-tech products that will define the century … Doing that starts with continuing investment in basic science and engineering research and technology development for which new products, new businesses and even new industries are formed … Innovation is more important than ...