Systems Approach for Adoption of Innovations in Organizations

A systems approach for adoption of innovations in organizations is presented. The approach is based on the spirit, mind and body framework described in ancient Hindu scriptures for balanced holistic living of a human being for achieving excellence. Since businesses can be considered as living systems with a purpose, the human metaphor is applied to business system. Accordingly systems of spirit, mind and body (SMB) are defined for an organization. The systems of mind are further categorized into deep structures and surface structures. While deep structures are required to support radical innovations, surface structures may be sufficient for incremental innovations. Using this framework, adoption of innovations in organizations is studied taking a specific example of capability maturity (CMM/CMMI) model implementation in an IT services company in India. The importance of systemic approach in the adoption of radical innovations in organizations is highlighted.