No abstract

No abstract

Innovation in retailing is under-investigated in academia and yet a highly relevant concern given the current changes in the retail landscape. Although retailing is often characterized by a dynamic and highly competitive environment, retail organizations are not often considered as 'innovative,' at least when compared with manufacturing industries, or when using existing innovation frameworks in academic literature. There are many aspects of innovation discussed in literature and a need to consider different ways of looking into retail's innovativeness. Among them, the importance of organizational climate on influencing creativity and innovation may help explain how to enable innovation in service organizations, such as retailers. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the climate for innovation and creativity and examine how retail organizations perceive it. We applied a mixed-methods approach using an established organizational climate survey and semi-structured, one-on-one interviews regarding the innovation climate and other aspects of innovation management in the companies. The study shows that despite retail organizations still struggling to incorporate innovation on a strategic level and move beyond incremental developments in their operations, retailers score positively on being innovative regarding certain dimensions of the organizational climate survey. This indicates that retailers (especially conventional ones) could benefit from challenging current practices and moving towards becoming more active and strategic innovators since their organizational climate to a certain extent allows for it. Respondents within the organizations also express a need for better innovation support, whether it is through established structures and processes or an improvement in the current conditions of the organizational climate. How retailers could enable themselves to become more active innovatorsbased on what we know that retailers look more towards entrepreneurship and continuous development as a driving force rather than formalized innovation practices per seis a potential avenue for further research.

No abstract

In order to increase their innovation capability, many organizations make the effort to actively change their R&D working practices. In parallel, measurement is an important issue with regard to managing innovation. In this paper, innovation management and measurement theory are combined with empirical investigations of experiences of using measurement as a support to the development of innovation capability in practice. The paper reports results from analysis of measurement data and a semi‐structured interview study, encompassing 19 interviews with managers and engineers involved in the current change activities of the case company. The study reveals that various innovation measurement mechanisms are used in different departments in the R&D organization, reflecting the diverse views of what constitutes innovation that dominate in each group, as well as the group's level of involvement in the on‐going building of innovation capability – from heavily involved (innovation leaders) to attentiveness from a distance (innovation laggards and progress evaluators). This, together with challenges related to identifying relevant metrics to support both incremental and radical innovation and managing existing reward and goal‐setting systems, is seen to have implications on the capability development in the organization requiring attention to how innovation measurement is designed, implemented and used in practice.