GUEST POST by Grant Alexander Wilson from The Conversation
Over the past two years, businesses have experienced unprecedented operational disruptions and market uncertainties due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Accordingly, many business executives are prioritizing innovation to enhance competitiveness and performance in 2022. This is easier said than done, as the list of supposedly essential innovative practices is extensive and growing.
For example, recent research shows that innovative companies, compared to their non-innovative counterparts, engage in many highly touted best practices. While these practices can enhance competitiveness, some are more important than others, and implementing them in the absence of a strategy is highly problematic.
As a marketing and innovation management researcher, I found these complexities led me to two research questions. First, what kind of organizational culture best supports implementing these innovative practices? And second, which of these practices universally enhance firm performance?
C. Brooke Dobni and I investigated these issues in our forthcoming article in Research-Technology Management, an innovation management journal.
Global innovation study
In co-operation with national conference boards in the United States, Europe and Asia (non-profit organizations that support research aimed at helping leaders address societal challenges), we collected data from 437 companies, across 11 industries, in 27 countries.
Our findings showed that an innovation-focused culture was required to successfully implement crowd-sourcing, stage-gate systems, design thinking, open innovation, big data analytics, innovation management software, scientific discovery and prototyping. However, only some of the these practices enhanced company performance.
Companies with strong innovation cultures have leaders that support innovating, dedicate resources to experimentation, pursue knowledge generation and dissemination and have processes to test and launch ideas. High innovators are able to execute strategy, create competitive advantages and achieve performance objectives.
This article excerpt is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the full original article.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Grant Alexander Wilson
Dr. Wilson is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Business Administration at the University of Regina. He teaches marketing, strategy, and innovation courses. His current research interests include marketing, business strategy, innovation management, and organizational learning. Dr. Wilson has published in the Journal of Small Business Management, Research-Technology Management, Health Marketing Quarterly, Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship, Journal of High Technology Management Research, Journal of Innovation Management, Strategy & Leadership, Asia Pacific Management Review, and other esteemed academic journals.