Discuss abou the Challenges to Organizational Innovation-Case Study.
Today, organizations strive to outdo each other by making their processes more effective and efficient that encourages more flexibility in operations. The effectiveness and efficiency in operations is mostly achieved through innovation or embracing of new technology in the organizational setting. Innovation is fast becoming the most significant factor in organizational growth and development upon ensuring success. It is therefore critical that technological advancement is embraced by every organization that values growth and success. According to Bessant (2003), innovation presents an opportunity for an organization to renew its processes, it is therefore significant that organizations focus on ways of managing innovation in its processes.
The success and milestones achieved by most organizations today are highly dependent on the nature of technological advancement in its possession. Technology and innovation, therefore, essentially seem to be the determinant of success in most organizations today, innovation would somehow break or make an organization. According to Timmerman., et al (2014), most organizations have realized the need to foster innovation among their employees since it turns out to be to their own benefit. The end goal of innovation in organizations is to keep up the pace with the ever-changing world ensuring effectiveness and efficiency which in turn would steer such organizations to achieve a competitive edge in the global world of business. Because of the end goal of competitive advantage, it is essentially recommendable that organizational stakeholders foster a culture of being creative in their employees both at an individual level and at a team level.
According to Sernack (2016), organizations that embrace opportunities for change through innovation in the volatile and highly uncertain business environments, are not only likely to survive the harsh business environments but also are tipped to compete favorably and flourish even at the verge of fluctuating and harsh business and economic times. Furthermore, such organizations would benefit from their pursuit of innovation as a systematic, strategic and a human-centered shift for engaging an innovative routine and culture in their underlying business lines.
Also notable is that innovation in organizations come in different dimensions. Fenwick (2003) identifies three dimensions of innovative learning; level, rhythm, and magnitude. Level dimension is more concerned with whether the innovation in mind is at an individual level, group or organization. Rhythm on the other hand is more of whether the innovation process is episodic or continuous and finally, magnitude level innovation encompasses innovation that is either adaptive or generative.
What then constitutes an innovation in an organizational point of view? Selwyn et al., (1967) in their journal article on the Innovative Organization define innovation as a procedure that pursues invention but distinct from an invention by time and location. In their definition, Selwyn and company identify that innovation that takes place inside an organization for instance in the research department is not likely to put in use by that same organization or at the same time the invention takes place but rather, at a later time, the organization or a different one altogether may implement the first use of that particular invention. In this context, therefore, the first user or implementer of the innovation becomes the inventor. Further, Selwyn et al., (1967) also assert that innovation does not necessarily need to occur in an organization but rather an individual initiative.
According to Playford (n.d), most organizations do not offer a conducive environment around which innovative employees can put into practice their innovative skills. Carrefour is no exception. The fear is that in the event that an employee gets involved in a task outside his/her own, s/he may get distracted and deviate completely from his normal responsibility which may affect the organization’s output. As a result, most employees at Carrefour do not feel supported when they want to put to task their innovative ideas. The outcome of this routine in lack of creativity in the organization fostering the culture of a centralized manner of doing things.
Motivated employees are known to be very productive and ready to share ideas that can have a long time positive influence to an organization. Empowering employees is one way of motivating your labor force, if employees feel lack of empowerment and support in their undertakings, they become demotivated hence draw back from any effort to implement innovative ideas. This is also seen at Carrefour. Carrefour therefore needs to design development oriented programs such as inventor program training, encouraging competition using contests and even training and exchange programs so that employees can learn new things and implement the same given resources. Carrefour is coming up with ideas on how to motivate its employees for example by designing a health and safety program for its employees at workplace, training on hygiene, accident prevention and conducting regular facility audits to ascertain safety working environment (Carrefour Group, n.d).
Playford (n.d) asserts that it is a crucial practice for an organization to develop an innovative strategy which will determine the direction of invention in the organization and the means to implement it. Carrefour has to come up with an innovation strategy that focuses on globalization. The focus should be to produce goods and services that are internationally oriented. Pisano et al., (2015) identify that a proper innovation strategy would promote adequate alignment of activities in a diverse group of employees, identify and uphold the organizational objective, and help put concentration around the organizational objectives and priorities, this approach lacks at Carrefour. It is therefore a requirement that Carrefour aligns its innovative strategies alongside their business strategies to achieve harmony of activities that support the main objective.
Carrefour’s marketing strategy is purely dependent on retail markets which gives the marketing department all the liberty of setting innovative pace at the organization. Centralizing innovation to one group of employees or stakeholders in an organization contributes greatly to lack of motivation to an organization’s labor force. It breeds specialization rather than encouraging diversity in the organizational setting in which everyone feels included in a process. Centralizing innovation to say for instance Research and Development or Product Development departments in the pretext that innovation is solely their responsibility is not only mythical but also a big hindrance to innovative ideas in the organization being exploited. An organization should have a decentralized means of encouraging innovation by offering equal chances and platforms for encouraging innovation (Bucic & Gudergan, 2011).
Most organizations concentrate majorly on internal collaboration in regards to innovation and ignore the external collaboration which is equally important. Internal collaboration in most instances encourage innovation up to a certain level in which all ideas are exhausted, at this point, the organization becomes deficient of innovative and inventing ideas internally. Carrefour has initiated means of external collaboration with Goodman group for logistics development. Embracing external collaboration brings on board industry partners, competitors and organization clients to drive forward innovation (Lassen & Laugen, 2017).
Initially, Carrefour concentrated its products at one place encouraging consumers to find all they needed at one central point, but with the evolution of the business environment in which people can even purchase items at their home comfort, this strategy had to be reinvented (Balasescu, 2016). Carrefour should further focus efforts in employing diverse team in the organization to steer innovative ideas in different departments of the organization. Hiring and engaging an innovative team in the organization will encourage and provide innovation initiatives with diverse ideas generated from different perspectives. Dionna (2017) identifies that an organization should be prepared to ensure diversity in its workforce which is significant inbreeding and implementing innovative ideas. Further, organizations should ensure diversity in different levels such as ensuring cultural/ethnic diversity, diversity in gender, and diversity in capability.
Carrefour’s customer connections had issues when the organization concentrated more on centralizing its products to one point (Balasescu, 2016). Customer is the king, goes the old business say. Customers are the important stakeholders of every organization’s business. Traditionally, it is the role and mandate of an organization to provide good and quality customer service. Alien (2011) assert that customer is the king means a lot and not just giving the customers the best service, but also knowing their power, do not tell them what to do because they are the king, make things easy and in their way of preference and allow them dictate what they desire. Carrefour has reinvented this strategy by encouraging innovative ideas such as Carrefour Planet which gives customers all-new experience by ensuring efficiency. Staying connected to your customers would help one understand their demands and staying alert for any deviations in the future. Actually, staying connected to your customers gives a clear understanding of the problems to solve using innovation in the organization.
The strategy of having products at a central point encouraged doing the same old thing over and over at Carrefour which did not give customers new experience in shopping with Carrefour hypermarkets, this was an example of successful product lines. Successful product line in an organization breeds complacency in innovation. When an organization realizes that the products it offers completely satisfies the needs of its clients in the market, it becomes complacent in improving the products further or offering something different to its esteemed clients. This move makes the organization to encourage a routinized approach to its business which in essence does not encourage innovative culture (Decision Innovation, 2018).
Innovation is a crucial initiative in an organization which seeks to have a better platform for measuring and evaluating the outcomes of the whole process. It is important therefore that Carrefour establishes an effective benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of the innovation in any process which in the process will help the organization is also evaluating the business success. Playford (n.d) further identifies that it is crucial to measure the amount of new ideas generated in the business by the workforce, measure the amount of time spent in innovation and also the value of investment as a result of the innovative initiative.
Organizational culture is a significant aspect of an innovation process because it contributes to the effects on the innovation process. Carrefour’s culture of diversity of the workforce recently implemented came with challenges in the structuring of communication to ensure a hierarchical flow of information from top management to the low-level employees. Companies that achieve great success have a clear alignment of their organizational culture and the innovation strategies such as change of leadership and channels of communication (Grant and Shamonda, 2018). A strong organizational culture should be one that supports innovation within the organization by encouraging both internal and external innovation agents. It is crucial that every organization identifies ways and strategies of managing innovation in its culture by defining cultural characteristic that support their innovative strategies.
Peters (2014) argue that the most appropriate organizational structure is that which conforms with the operating aspect of the organization for instance the scale of operation, environment of operation, and the technological application in the processes. Carrefour’s organizational structure follows a hierarchy of leadership from the CEO which then disintegrates down the hierarchy. The hierarchical arrangement is an impediment to decision-making process characterized by much time spent in the process which would require everyone’s input. A rigid organizational culture is characterized by an organization with suitable conditions under which it operates and embraces the culture of successful product line which cannot be changed, in this case, the management of innovation is rigid just like the structure. A hierarchical organizational system is more flexible in its arrangements, adapt quickly to changes and encourages innovation culture in the organization.
Organizational success heavily lies on the shoulders of the leadership. From the key stakeholders, top management, and other management levels, the burden of ensuring organizational growth and development thus success heavily weighs down to the type of leadership strategies that they use. Carrefour’s leadership structure is one which observes delegation of duty from the top management to the lower level management. The hierarchy of leadership ensures efficient and effective flow of information from the top. According to Li et al., (2018) having a transformational leadership contributes tremendously to triggering organizational innovation. It is important to identify leaders as per their characteristics and style of management which are critical in fostering innovation in the organization and encourage them to establish an environment where key stakeholders can think outside the box to come up and implement innovative ideas.
Carrefour processes are horizontally attributed. Organizational processes are categorized into two major types; the vertical integration and horizontal integration. Organizations that have vertical integration are involved incomplete development of the product until it reaches the customers, in other words, vertically integrated organizations undertake and control all the stages of product design and development chain. Whereas horizontal integration as is the case of Carrefour, is more focused in one aspect of the product value chain for example sales of finished products. Beltz (2013) asserts that vertically integrated organizations give a better room for organizational innovation than their counterparts, horizontal integration. Product development is more advanced in vertical integration due to their ability to work in a closed internal innovation.
Partners in an organizational business include but not necessarily limited to customers, competitors, suppliers, researchers, and consulting organizations (Simao et al., 2016). Carrefour has a lot of partner including its customers and suppliers regionally and internationally, for example Carrefour has a longtime partnership with CFAO in which the two have a distribution rights together in different countries, UHD, Majid Al Futtam among others (propertydivision, n.d). These are also referred to as business collaborators. Carrefour uses collaboration as a way to reinvent itself by taking advantage of the competitive edge in the market. Partnering and collaboration is a strategy that can be used by organizations to work together towards achieving a common objective such as sharing the use of technology, unifying their product development, sharing resources, enhancing capacity or even market access. Partnering and collaboration is, therefore, an important factor when considering innovation in an organization as it is a way to expose, motivate and encourage employees of a given organization to embrace and utilize available resources in putting to task their innovative ideas (Ekawati, 2014).
According to Pearson (2018), innovation strategy refers to the summation of long-term plans that map the direction taken by an organization to achieve its set objectives. Carrefour’s marketing strategy features joint venturing like the case of Chinese market access in which it formed a joint venture with the Chinese local government to establish retail shops in which most of the goods sold in such markets are Chinese made. This, however, came with problems of limited outsourcing of products from other countries to sell in Chinese markets. An organizational strategy needs to dynamic in order to realize different ways of achieving the objectives in the best and affordable means possible. Abdul et al., (2016) identify that the dynamics of organizational strategies would encourage innovation that focuses majorly on changing with the changing of consumer demands and preferences. Businesses cannot survive in a changing environment if they do not embrace innovations that are in line with the changes in the operational environment.
Innovation, according to Forbes (2016), is the key to organizational success, the most innovative companies are the most successful. It is, therefore, a requirement that every organization embraces innovation. For this reason, therefore, it is recommended that;
Conclusion
In conclusion, therefore, with innovation, there is a great chance for organizational survival even in economic hard times and overcoming competition from established competitors. The more direct and a better option in managing innovation is by an organization remaining steadfast in encouraging activities that are innovative oriented and strategies that get rid of barriers and hindrances to innovation hence transforming the organizational culture from being anti-innovation to more resourceful and which motivates and rewards key innovators in the organization (Reshno, 2015).
Reshno further asserts that it is easier for organizations to overcome and remove innovation barriers in the organization by clearly making it easy for their innovative team to understand how their roles and responsibilities and work depth would fit in with the overall objectives of the organization. Any organizational improvement, therefore, requires a change which will encourage creativity and innovation hence finding amicable solutions for better problem analysis and eradication.
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