Crafting the forever now: Corporate heritage brand innovation at John Lewis Partnership

Abstract

AbstractBeing innovative and adaptive to changing business environment fosters and sustains the success of corporations with heritage. Our article addresses the insights of the innovation strategy of John Lewis Partnership (JLP) as a corporate heritage brand and reveals that strategic innovation the key strand of JLP's brand heritage, which has contributed to the continuous success of JLP for over a century. Developed from the S‐curve innovation theory, we have developed a corporate heritage brand innovation process framework with four stages: invention, sustainability, expansion, and extension. Our research confirms that S‐curve innovation theory can be applied to scrutinize organizational innovation of corporations with heritage brand.