Assess The Company Pixar Media Essay

Assess The Company Pixar Media Essay This report is going to assess the company Pixar from an innovation perspective. This report will focus on the good and bad points of the company to give an insight into its attitude towards innovation. A number of different methods were used to gather the information in this report, such as websites, interviews, articles and books. Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) purchased the computer graphics section of Lucasfilm Ltd in 1986 and called this new company Pixar. Pixar started as a very small company with only 44 employees. Pixar started making short animations films which were at the forefront of CGI technology. Pixar also created a number of adverts for companies such as Listerine in their early years. The first feature length movie Pixar created was Toy Story and it was the first fully computer generated animated film ever, Toy Story grossed $362 million worldwide. Pixar did not just create animations, they also developed a lot of the technology which allowed them to create their films. Wo rk teams and some individuals won numerous awards from organisations like The Scientific and Engineering Academy Awards in fields such as Digital scanning and Direct input devices. One huge advantage Pixar has over other animation companies is their unique understanding of innovation in company structure and employee relations, this report will aim to discuss this in further detail. Section 2 – Employee relations Pixar is a very organic company which disagrees with the structure of mechanistic organisations. A mechanistic organisation has a very hierarchical structure and the companies future is dictated by those in senior roles. Section 2.1 – Brad Bird Steve Jobs hired Brad Bird into the company after its first three successful films, Jobs was worried that they had ran out of creativity and he did not want the company to go stale. Brad Bird understood that there was room for improvement in the companies creative process. Bird understood that every employees input is v alid and has its use. He knew that communication is vital in the innovation process so everyone can help each other to create the best work possible. The main problem with this is that It is difficult to get employees to speak their minds as they are often afraid of criticism from their peers, and they have good reason to fear this as they are working with some of the best animators in the world. Birds solution to this problem was to get the employees in groups to look at the work each member had done that day. Bird wanted to encourage people to speak their minds, he talked about the strong and weak points of each persons work and praised people for challenging his criticisms. At first this did not work very well, before Bird was introduced to the company the animators were afraid to criticise any work as previous managers did not take kindly to criticism, however constructive it was. It took nearly two months for any of the employees to actively participate in these group discussio ns, however one employee finally did and the rest of the employees saw that Bird praised this employee for doing so as he knew it was the best way to get everyone comfortable with this process.