Mapping the Innovation Process: Air New Zealand

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Changes are an integral and essential process of any company development. Although at some point, it might seem that a company has reached an ultimate success and that there is nowhere else to evolve, with the technological innovations and the changes within the theory of business and management, there will always be some room for improvement.

Therefore, it is crucial that the innovation process should be continuous and unceasing. Despite the fact that the Air New Zealand Company has been successful enough throughout its existence, over the past few years, the company has started to experience problems in delivering the services of the required quality, as well as maintaining high company standards, which called for a reconsideration of the company’s hiring policies.

To understand the changes that occurred in the Air New Zealand, the innovation mapping method should be utilized.

It is quite remarkable that the stage of searching and the process of locating the basic problem that stood in the way of the Air New Zealand development did not take long.

By adopting the method known as searching in the mapping system, the company managers realized that the target audience needed to be changed, since the middle class, middle-aged businessmen did not take a major part of their clientele anymore. Instead, the company had to focus on a much younger audience and find the ways to convince teenagers to use their services (Brand Strategy, 2012).

As it has been stressed above, the concerns regarding the lack of interest coming from the younger target audience, as well as the fact that the employees could not produce the ideas that would attract younger audience, were the key problems to be detected.

It would be logical that the Sir New Zealand should respond to the latter problem first by introducing training courses for its employees; however, the leader of the company preferred to address the first problem, therefore, recruiting younger and more initiative staff. However, the Air New Zealand was clearly facing yet another challenge, which concerned training the new staff.

Therefore, the process of implementing, which the third stage of the innovation mapping method offers, presupposed dealing with two issues at once, i.e., creating the atmosphere in which the new employees could acquire knowledge faster, and working on the promotion campaign that could attract teenagers to the company services (Air New Zealand Selected as Most Innovative Airline by Airlinetrends.com, 2012).

The last, but definitely not the least, the stage of learning must be mentioned as an inevitable phase of the innovation mapping process.

Even though Air New Zealand has to put its efficiency at stake by recruiting new staff, the company has definitely learned the necessity to keep in pace with time and make sure that the younger audience should also be interested in the company’s products. In addition, the company has clearly learned much about the problems of ethics in HRM policies.

It should be mentioned, though, that at certain stages, the process of innovation mapping could have gone a lot smoother in the Air New Zealand; among the stages that caused the greatest concern, the conceptualizing phase of selecting must be mentioned. Despite the fact that the problem regarding the company’s HRM policies was finally defined, it was clear that the company managers were hesitant to carry out specific actions.

The given hesitation can be understood quite easily; although there were clear signs of the need for the Air New Zealand to recruit younger employees who could help the company attract younger clients and, therefore, shape the Air New Zealand’s target audience and improve the company’s ratings among the so-called “Generation Y” (Strategic Recruitment of Gen Y – Air New Zealand, n. d.).

On the one hand, it was crucial for the company to recruit the people who could appeal to the younger demographic; on the other hand, dismissing the employees that the company had invested so much in would have been quite a risky move as well. Therefore, the Air New Zealand was clearly facing a dilemma. It is rather upsetting that the air New Zealand decided to recruit new staff instead of the trained employees.

Indeed, the company could have solved the given problem in a very efficient manner by creating training courses for the employees who might have lost their abilities for self-education. However, it would be hard to judge the company, seeing how the Air New Zealand was facing a serious crisis and that the company’s future depended on the decision that the leader would make.

Despite the fact that the Air New Zealand Company was at the brink of losing its popularity and revenues, the reconsideration of the company’s HRM strategies allowed for a redesign of the firm and the following increase in the company’s popularity.

It is important to stress that the existing opportunities were used by the company in a very clever way; instead of simply reassessing the company’s strengths and weaknesses, the company managers decided to introduce a step-by-step plan of what changes are going to occur to the company, and how the existing asses could be used in order to improve the economical and financial state of affairs, which the innovation mapping tool helps to view in a very clear manner.