Entrepreneurship and innovation are very significant among all the major areas of the organisation. As stated by Henry et al., (2018), entrepreneurial venture tries to amalgamate the economy by recognising new opportunities and redirecting the resources of the organisation. The firms want to innovate so that they can outmanoeuvre to the competition. Innovation process helps to deal with new challenges so that the organisation can increase delivery of the products and services. This process covers the foundation of the entrepreneurship process, strategy of the creative thinking and process of planning, developing and launching of the new venture. In this assessment, Wakatu Incorporation is chosen to showcase the strategy and innovation process in Maori business. Wakatu is actively involved for the wider community and business development in New Zealand is one of the biggest agendas for Wakatu. Wakatu has more than 4,000 shareholders and this organisation is based in Nelson. Wakatu is focused on food and beverage business which sells quality beverage, fruit bars, pipefruit and hops.
In the first section, business strategies are assessed of Wakatu Corporation and management challenges are also highlighted. In the following part, innovate entrepreneurship and business practices along with strategies are framed.
Wakatu Corporation follows to be creative and the organisation takes the forward-thinking people who like to gift the land to the organisation along with cultural identity. Wakatu follows the strategy of preserving and enhancing now and future generations. The organization wants to achieve the sustainable use and development of the land along with resources by creating the community where the community lives. The strategy of Wakatu is to work with the human resources along with families, staffs and customers in which they are associated. In addition, Wakatu takes the strategy of aligning the common energy and working so that they can achieve towards common goal. Wakatu management wants to nurture and develop the policies of the organisation consistently with others. The organisation wants to harness the talents of the people to ensure the sustainable growth of the community. The organisation takes the strategy of ensuring people live well along with connecting the legacy and purpose of the organisation. In order to create and inspire the employees and community, Wakatu takes the strategy of innovation where the talented people can live and work in peace (Wakatu.org, 2018).
The objectives of the organisation are to give the people freedom to create new and exciting ways to do things consistently with values. Two major strategies of Wakatu are development and innovation along with identity and integrity.
According to McKinsey 7-S Model, an organization can be divided into seven distinct elements. These elements can be further categorized as hard elements, and soft elements. Following is the assessment of Wakatu on the basis of 7s:
Hard Elements:-
Strategy: Wakatu as stated earlier in the aforesaid section is aimed to offer quality products. This is why it has constantly identified creative partners to support its business. It collaborated with “Kono” to access its superiority in beverages, foods, and horticulture. The corporate services in Wakatu is being provided incorporation with “AMO”. With all this, Wakatu is now one of the major landowners in the Tasman and Nelson region (Wakatu.org, 2018).
Structure: Wakatu follows a divisional organizational structure, which is followed by many other reputed food and beverage companies in New Zealand. However, it faces the challenge along with the structure. Human Resource Management is one of the areas where Wakatu faces the challenge. The HRM has the challenge to reduce employee turnover rate, and attract new talents, which looks to be a difficult task considering that labor shortages is increasingly growing. Changing demographics has also emerged as an issue. Due to labor shortages, Wakatu is left with no more option than to rely on the migrants (Wakatu.org, 2018).
Systems: It is problematic because few people are actively involved in political think-tank. This include but is not limited to like managers and employees.
Soft Elements:-
Shared Values: Wakatu enjoys and maintains shared values as it is evident from its collaboration with so many shareholders.
Skills: Wakatu continues to enjoy skilled workers in the company. However, it needs to find an answer to rising attrition in the company and labor shortages in New Zealand.
Style: The Company has too many leaders working together; however, it does not have a single person who can be identified as an ideal leader. It hampers the level of communication between managers. As a result, important messages are conveyed with a delay to employees. Indeed, the company needs one person as a leader who does not just possess relevant skills but is also able to influence the work behavior of its employees.
Staff: As stated earlier, staffs are skilled and are well versed in doing their jobs.
(Wakatu.org, 2018)
From the 7s model, this can be concluded that Wakatu needs to work in few areas on an urgent basis to avoid any further harms being done to the company. The company at present faces an increasingly growing attrition of employees, reduced motivation into employees, and communication gap between managers and employees etc. These areas need to be addressed immediately, so that, Wakatu has enough opportunities to apply new ideas and thoughts on emerging things.
Human resource: In the Maori Business, it is the human resource which creates values. It is the people which instil the organisational culture, execute plans and set the system of the organisation. Human resources in Maori business are not skilled enough to continue with the work and people can erode values of the Trust which must not be consistent with the approach which allows the organisation to provide values. The majority of the participants need to understand the Maori business so that the organisation can continue with New Zealand workplace culture (Nzherald.co.nz, 2018). In Maori business like Wakatu, retention issue of the employees creates problem as the organisation fails to retain maximum numbers of skilled employees. Not having the right set of people within the organisation impacts on missed the opportunities to grow in the industry. Skills gap in the management is mentioned on the Maori Trusts and it is one of the key barriers of success. People fail to create the quality strategic planning for the organisation ad it can be taken as the missed opportunities for the organisation. In Wakatu Corporation, senior managers need to recognise the skill deficit which must be unsure to best develop the talents inside the organisation to find the right outside the expertise. As a Maori business, the management focuses on the sustainability; therefore, Wakatu wants to train the employees so that they can help the organisation to grow an economic base which enables Whanau to achieve along with maintain the spirituality of the employees (Craig et al., 2018). Sustainability strategy is integral to manage commercial operations in order to meet the obligations of Kaitiakitanga.
Politics in workplace: Workplace politics within Maori business is a severe issue for the management to handle as politics is one of the greatest challenges in terms of effectiveness of culture. As stated by Bodwitch (2017), it is foreseeable that culture of the organisation also exists within the considered as having the less impact than the political ones. Workplace culture in Wakatu creates issue between different types of priorities like age, gender and consequences of achieving the Trust goals. Maori culture is different than other businesses as Maori economics when surpluses sub-tribal enterprises can be viewed as appealing among the Maori based organisation. Politics culture is different as Maori ingenuity in business is not normalised within the media, health and education. The power of enterprise is to transform Maori lives to share the motion following Maori economic development.
Leadership: Maori businesses have too many owners as it provides challenges in terms of communicating with owners so that it can make decisions on behalf of Maori business. As opined by Gibson (2015), the legal requirement of the business is to gain approval from the large number so that they can individualise the work for an administrative burden. Leadership issue in Maori is to help to solve the issue for Maori unemployment and the leaders fail to understand the culture of the organisation. Maori leaders have their own set of values which they try to impose on the business and this leadership sometimes are not incorporating with business, meaningful along with based on Maori themes. Therefore, the impact of leadership on Maori business Wakatu is the lack of accountability, lack of alignment along with lack of clear vision for the organisation. Leaders fail to communicate their views as they can complexity business world is to be able to communicate on multiple levels.
The company is one of the most famous Maori organization in the world and has been growing at a fast pace. There are some of the issues which has been already discussed in the paper. The first issue that has been discussed in this regards is the problem of human resource. There are scarcity of enough skilled human resource in the Maori community. Therefore it is often seen that there are not often skilled human resource available to the companies. Wakatu is a specialized organization that is in need. Food and beverage companies are engaged in manufacturing specialized packed food and beverage products which are to be manufactured in specialized environments in strict supervision of employees who are knowledgeable about the work they are doing. Therefore trained and skilled human resource is needed on a constant basis so that the normal operations of the company can continue on a regular basis, when there is a need of expansion of the business the need for the human resource increases. Therefore when there is a lack of skilled human resource in the human resource pool from where the company desires to pull up its workforce it is natural that the company must take help of the innovation and improved strategies.
The first innovation that can be adopted in this case is to further mechanize the process. More manual work obviously gives rise to need of more human resources. The company must look for better innovation in the field of manufacturing of the various products it has been engaged in manufacturing. The process which is included in the manufacturing of wine or other food products and beverages are all having several stages requiring much human efforts.
The company must reduce dependence on the human resources, and must brining more innovative mechanical support (Serrat, 2017). There are mechanized processes of producing wine but the company mainly depends on the more human intensive processes. The problem of the scarcity of human resource lies in the stages where it requires skilled knowledge. There are skills to be acquired such as operating machines or doing similar technical works. Therefore the company can adopt an innovative process of training the employees at a short time. This is the reason that when an employee leaves it takes a long time to fulfill that position, because the training takes a longer time. The new innovative process of training the employees will be better when there is contingency to fill up gaps. The innovation in this case can be developing a new process where the new employees will not go through a separate training process and then join the job, but they will be pulled in the regular job from the beginning and will be trained as they continue learning about the process. This will help in getting the work done and at the same time train the employees, the induction of the employees will also take a much lesser time (Horth & Vehar, 2015).
The next problem or issue that is held in this case is the issue of politics in workplace. The problem is mainly seen in all Maori organizations. There are problems of politics within workplace, or back biting and trying to ensure that sine competitors are ousted from the position they are holding. This is a common problem which has given rise to the problem of employee attrition. This is the reason that the problem of dissatisfaction among the employees within the workplace is also found. Innovation that can be used in this case is the change to be brought in the workplace environment. Therefore the innovation in this case is the change in the workplace culture and how the mindset of the employees can be changed. This can be done through effective change management processes. Change management must be conducted under supervision and guidance of the experts in the field of change management. The structural change is the key to such a problem. This is the basic unit of change management, to bring in change in the organizational structure. New posts can be created and the employees can be shuffled regularly within the departments so that the scope of politics is reduced. The process of change management is important for the companies to control attrition and to ensure that the problem of workplace politics can be reduced.
The last issue that is faced in the organization is the issue of leadership. The organization needs proper decisive leaders to thrive properly in the organizational context (Kuratko, 2017). The leadership of the company is quite able because the company has grown properly in the last decade under the leadership of this organization. Wakatu is one of the largest Maori organization and the present Chairman is Paul Morgan. The leadership must keep itself updated about the latest leadership trends to be in business.
Conclusion
Every organization faces issues at every stage, the issues faced by the organization must be solved through innovation and strategy. Therefore the organization must be monitoring all the departments and understand the areas where the issues are mainly aggravated. The official position stated by the company about innovation is as follows.
“We understand that innovation and adaptability will be the key to our success. We are efficient, focused on our people, our resources and our environment.
Guiding objectives:
To ensure the retention, preservation and knowledge of culturally significant land.
To retain our corpus land area and land value within our region.
To ensure the use and development of our land and resources is sustainable and consistent with our tikanga.
To create, source and provide products and services of high value and quality that society wants, in a sustainable and ethical manner.
To create a world community of people who believe in and promote our products and services.
To be the best indigenous food and beverage business in the world.
To thrive and continue to grow as an economic, political and commercial force” (Wakatu.org, 2018).
Reference
Bodwitch, H. (2017). Challenges for New Zealand’s individual transferable quota system: Processor consolidation, fisher exclusion, & M?ori quota rights. Marine Policy, 80, 88-95.
Craig, R., Taonui, R., Wild, S., & Rodrigues, L. L. (2018). Accountability reporting objectives of M?ori organizations. Pacific Accounting Review. 4(3), 89-98.#development-innovation.
Gibson, A. (2015). Mana and money–the Maori business evolution. New Zealand Herald. 7(3), 90-99.
Henry, E. Y., Dana, L. P., & Murphy, P. J. (2018). Telling their own stories: M?ori entrepreneurship in the mainstream screen industry. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 30(1-2), 118-145.
Horth, D. M., & Vehar, J. (2015). Innovation: How leadership makes the difference. White Paper Report, Center for Creative Leadership.
Kuratko, D. F. (2017). Corporate Entrepreneurship & Innovation: Today’s Leadership Challenge. The Wiley Handbook of Entrepreneurship, 293-311.
NZ Herald. (2018). Retrieved from: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12006138
Serrat, O. (2017). Harnessing creativity and innovation in the workplace. In Knowledge Solutions (pp. 903-910). Springer, Singapore.
Wakatu.org. (2018). Our Past, Our Future — Wakatu Incorporation. Retrieved from https://www.wakatu.org/our-past-our-future/ Wakatu Corporations. (2018). Strategies of Wakatu. Retrieved from: https://www.wakatu.org/#about-our-people
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