Innovation And Entrepreneurship Performance Analysis For Woolworths

Revolution Level

Discuss about the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Performance Analysis.

Woolworths is a supermarket based in Australia, with 872 stores.  It relies on a broad range of staff in its stores to provide efficient services to its customers, (Poid.com, 2008). There is a wide variety of supermarkets and retail stores in this country, making competition very high. Innovation is the putting into use, of new ideas to satisfy the needs of customers. (Burns, 2008) Entrepreneurs usually utilize innovation in creating opportunities and changes that ensure profitability in their firms.

Levels of Innovation that can be utilized by Woolworths.

Innovation can occur in three levels, which include; revolution, renewal and resilience levels.

Revolution level: This level involves changing the structures of the firm. Modern marketing requires the use of online platforms to obtain clients (Drucker, 2014). Woolworths is also not an exception as it uses online locator apps that enable its customers to find its stores quickly. The supermarket could also use more innovative channels to ensure proper interaction with their clients. This can be done through revolution, whereby new platforms of communication are formed. Such platforms may include; listing its products on its Facebook page to receive customer likes and developing more online service channels to reduce the long queues in the stores. These channels could enable the customers to efficiently order products and have them delivered to their premises without physically going to the stores.

Renewal level: This level involves changing the whole model of the business. In supermarkets, it can be executed through formulating a creative way of marketing and availing the products to the clients. Woolworths could use this aspect by changing its marketing model. Forming unique ways of promoting and pricing its goods may make customers develop a preference for its products (Bessant & Tidd, 2007). For example, it could revert to online ordering and delivery of products, coming up with no noise campaigns and rebranding their products, where customers switch off their phones and remove shoes when shopping in no interference zones. This could make the customers more comfortable when shopping in the stores. This method has been used successfully in the UK by Selfridges. 

Resilience level: According to Allen & Holling (2010), resilience involves administration of continuous changes in values, behaviors, and processes in the business to obtain the more innovative operating structure. This can be executed by stocking new products for customers, (Crumpton, 2012). Woolworths could use this strategy to ensure new products are available in its stores according to the client’s preference. This may be done by conducting a proper market research, to precisely establish what the customers need. Displaying products in Facebook and obtaining likes can be used as an appropriate and profitable method of inspecting customers’ preferences. Woolworths could also use Crowd sources suggestions on its website, to determine the likes of its current and potential customers. This innovative method has successfully been used by most supermarkets in Denmark and therefore could be appropriate for Woolworths as well for it to ensure improved performance.

Types of innovation Woolworths could incorporate.

Renewal Level

Innovation involves getting new ideas. It can be divided into open verses closed and disruptive versus sustaining innovation, (Groden, 2015). These types of change can be utilized by the supermarketin order to ensure improvement in its operations and profitability.

Disruptive versus sustaining innovation.

In the market, customers can be classified into high demanding and less demanding customers. The high demanding customers expect expensive and high-quality products to be availed for them, while the less demanding customers look for lowly priced and available products, (Christensen, Raynor & McDonald, 2015). Therefore, Woolworths could research appropriately on its clients and classify them accordingly. In places where there is a large number of less demanding customers, the supermarket can stock less expensive products so as to attract that particular market. On the other hand, in locations where there is a high concentration of high demanding customers, the costly and high-quality products should be stocked. This could make Woolworths more profitable as it will be able to understand its customers better.

Open versus closed innovation.

As explained by (Dawson & Andriopoulos, 2014), open innovation encompasses getting Ideas both from within the firm and outside the enterprise. It allows the organization to incorporate new ideas and strategies developed by its competitors when executing innovation. Traditionally, businesses used not to include ideas from other firms when formulating their operating plans. This was closed innovation. However, business is an open system, which should be considerate of its external environment in all its operations (Windrum & Koch, 2008). Woolworths could conduct an environmental scanning to identify unique strategies adopted by other supermarkets in Australia. This could make it improve more in its operations.

Innovation involves risk taking and proper management of the culture of the firm. Risk taking enables the company to venture into new fields without fearing failure or losses, (Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2009). Woolworths can execute this by developing many branches in untapped areas and investing in new technology to ensure efficient marketing and distribution of its products. Some norms it may perform are as follows.

Risk taking: Innovation involves a lot of risks. Woolworths should be ready to take risk and venture in new technology and marketing strategies. It could do this by using such apps like QThru and So-Post that could be utilized by customers to check the availability of products of their interests through their phones. This could reduce the long queues in the stores. So-Post also uses the email addresses of customers in executing the delivery, instead of using their home addresses. This is a major field of innovation that could be achieved by Woolworths.

Resilience Level

Tolerance of mistakes: In innovation, some errors may occur. These may involve inaccuracies and variances, (Barringer, 2012). Woolworths must be ready to tolerate these variations to execute innovation and improve performance.

Supporting change and proper conflict handling: There must be an appropriate conflict handling forum whenever a firm needs to conduct innovation. This is because there are variations of methods of executing changes in organizations, (Baumgartner, 2011). In the case of Woolworths, the managers could come up with proper avenues of addressing conflicts which may arise during the process of innovation.

Supporting the continuous process of learning and idea generation: Innovation involves learning and adopting new ideas. The managers in Woolworths should be able to support the generation of new ideas that would enable proper change.

Entrepreneurship

After inventing the new ideas and ways of operation, Woolworths should incorporate these ideas to ensure maximization of its customers’ requirements. This requires entrepreneurial leadership. Entrepreneurial leadership refers to the administration on entrepreneurial skills (Burns, 2008). Some of the elements of this type of leadership include;

Framing: Woolworths could use this feature to compose accurate expectations about innovative endeavors. This may involve prediction of profit increments due to the new ideas incorporated and predicting the time it may take to fully install the innovations created, (Cho, Mathiassen, & Robey, 2007). It may also entail predicting the amount of returns expected from investing in the new idea.

Creating opportunity register: This is coming up with a list of potentially feasible business opportunities, (Morris, Kuratko &Covin, 2010). This supermarket could record its innovative ideas and plan on how to execute them to improve its operations.

Promotion: Woolworths could promote its innovative strategies to ensure proper execution. It could do this by identifying the creative objectives, forming competitive benchmarks, establishing significant achievements expected and documenting the assumptions formulated.

Creating a supportive environment: This involves availing all the resources required to put the innovation into operation, (Snihur, 2016). Woolworths could do this by ensuring all the necessary supportive instruments and technology for innovation are availed.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, Woolworths could significantly improve its operations and profitability by venturing more in innovation and entrepreneurship. It could do this by establishing better technologically sensitive ways of marketing and provision of services, adopting better methods of innovation and following the elements of proper change. The innovative ideas should also be incorporated and put into use through entrepreneurial leadership.

References

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