The Innovation Value Chain and Adaptability of Organizations

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper reports on a study of adaptability of organizations and how that relates to their ability to generate innovations. Constructs from an organizational culture model and the innovation value chain was used as the foundation for a cross-sectional study in 7 organizations in Ireland. The findings reveal that adaptability is indeed related to innovativeness. Organizations that are good at creating change, learning, and creativity are better able to generate new ideas. In addition organizations that are also flexible can convert these ideas into outputs and subsequently disseminate them internally as well as outside the organization. Keywords: Innovation, Value Chain, Organizations, Culture INTRODUCTION It could well be argued that the world has entered the Age. Popular media frequently remind organizations and individuals how important innovation is in light of the wave of new ideas and developments in many fields (Ohr, 2015; Percy, 2015). Innovation could, on the one hand, be regarded as a driver for change since organizations that are aware of new innovations and are quick to adopt them may also create a competitive advantage for the organization by changing what they do and how they do it. On the other hand instead of just being the driver for change, innovation can also be regarded as a result of change. It is therefore useful to distinguish between adoption of innovations and the generation of innovations (Smit, 2014). Organizations also want to be innovative by generating new products, services, and so forth. It is therefore not surprising that executives consume increasing amounts of information about innovation, and try to learn how others do it, in an effort to get their own organizations to be more innovative (Rao & Weintraub, 2013). The question on everyone's lips is how do we become more innovative? Research has suggested a strong link between organizational culture and the innovativeness of organizations (Tellis et al., 2009). More specifically it has been suggested as far back as the 1990s that higher levels of innovativeness are present in organizations that are adaptable and have, amongst others, a culture of learning (Hurley & Hult, 1998). Their research however focused more specifically on market and learning orientation as antecedents for innovativeness. More recently Skerlavaj et al. (2010) focused on the concept of an organizational learning culture and its relation to innovation. From their study of more than 200 organizations they conclude that an organizational learning culture has an impact on specifically technical and administrative innovations in organizations. The above however focuses on a fairly narrow conceptualization of adaptability. Similar contributions in research on organizational culture and its relation to how organizations perform in a variety of areas, do offer a somewhat wider view of adaptability and its relationship with innovativeness (e.g. Dasgupta & Gupta, 2009; Denison, 1990, 2000; Smit 2014; Smit et al., 2008). The purpose of this paper is to further explore the adaptability of organizations and its relation with innovation and the following research question is offered: What is the relationship between Organizational Adaptability and Innovativeness? It has to be noted at this point that the research had an exploratory nature since relationship between the constructs used in the investigation has not been tested before. In addition the data that was used was taken from a larger set of more than 900 responses gathered from 21 organizations based in 7 countries (6 from Europe) in a study aimed at investigating the relationship between organizational culture in general and innovation and its adoption. Since this resulted in a fairly heterogeneous sample the responses from one country (Ireland) was isolated for exploratory purposes. For this reason no formal hypotheses are stated, but a general expectation is that the results will reveal moderate to strong correlations between Adaptability and Innovativeness. …