Innovation Culture as a Driver of a Firm’s Innovation Excellence: Evidence from Apple and Huawei

Abstract

Innovation culture is a pivotal driver of a firm’s innovation excellence. This inspires employees to think and do the unthinkable. In that context, this case study uses Apple and Huawei as examples to analyse how innovation culture drives innovation excellence in firms. In such analysis, critical content analysis was integrated with unstructured interviews with product managers from Apple-Glasgow Stores in Scotland and Huawei’s Authorised Stores in Dubai-United Arab Emirates. The study aimed to extract critical information on Apple and Huawei’s innovation behaviours, culture and practices as well as their competition enhancing effects. Outcomes of such analysis were triangulated with the results of systematic review of core theories and literature on innovation culture creation and its leveraging effects on a firm’s performance. Findings revealed innovation culture to unlock employees’ overall improved creativity to think and do the unimaginable. This creates higher product, process, position and paradigm differentiations to leverage a firm’s overall competitiveness. Huawei’s innovation culture catalyses the embracement of higher level of employee creativity and innovativeness across different business functions as a daily business practice and way of life that defines how each and every activity is accomplished. This was found to drive improved quality, cost minimisation and creation of process efficiency advantages that are passed to customers through lower prices to bolster Huawei’s overall process and position competitiveness. Likewise Apple’s entrenched innovation practices and behaviours were found to create higher premium values that customers are willing to acquire even if the products are of significantly higher premium prices. Combined with Apple’s higher commitment to quality excellence as an innovation culture that delights employees to think and do the unthinkable, this was found to bolster Apple’s competitive edge to fetch higher returns as a leader in the global premium telecommunication and consumer electronics segment. Despite its competitive edge, Apple still faces challenges of lowering prices to fill gaps in the lower-income segments that Huawei and Samsung are using as the attack base, inspite suffering from the phenomenon of ‘Made in China are Cheap”. From these findings, the paper extracted an innovative culture development model that can be emulated by the emerging innovation ventures.