Encyclopedia
Please note this is a comparison between Version 1 by kaoutar Jamai and Version 2 by Nora Tang.
As innovation has garnered substantial attention on corporate success and sustainability, organizations must evaluate internal contexts to determine potential innovative practices and benefits. Firms need to investigate the determining factors of innovation preparedness as organizational innovation practices are catalyzed through internal elements.
- cluster
- food industry
- innovative projects
- organizational readiness
- segmentation approach
1. Implementing Innovative Projects within Clusters
Innovation was typically acknowledged with multiple definitions. The Oslo Manual Guidelines [1][33] defined innovation as a novel or substantially enhanced product (goods or services), process, and new marketing or strategy implementation in corporate practices, professional firms, or external networking. The minimal innovation prerequisite required novel or highly improved products, processes, and marketing or organizational strategies [2][34]. Innovations proved successful with perpetual contributions and adaptations to organizational advancement and change [3][35]. Innovation is successful if it produces the ability of the company to contribute to growth through continuity and adaptation constantly. For example, companies and smaller units should be guided through intricate innovation processes (from concept creation to sale, revenue, and profit attainment) [4][11].
Sustainable financial development significantly relied on innovation model implementations with the innovation infrastructure as a critical determinant. The model offered robust associations between innovation topics and encouraged knowledge transfer and digital diffusion by acknowledging the potential for innovation [5][36]. Innovative implementation processes included an aggregate of studies, information, skills, instruments, and technologies established in project performance to fulfill the prerequisites [6][37]. Precise activity sequence and performance were deemed vital to identify project success or failure as the downfall led to the loss of economic resources that restricted potential organizational profitability [7][38].
As potential company failures increased with a high degree of innovation, project intricacy levels determined managerial strategies [8][39]. As such, it was deemed essential to enhance project management model versatility [7][38]. Innovation projects denoted a clear sample of high project intricacies as the management was significantly influenced by flexible strategy adoption for project planning [9][10][11][40,41,42]. Nevertheless, high innovative project management versatility resulted in challenging decision-making processes [12][43], specifically when the intricacies were associated with collective long-term ventures, such as clusters [13][14][15][44,45,46]. Porter [16][47] denoted clusters as a collaboration of firms, training centers, and research institutes within a specific geographical space to establish synergies around collective innovative projects. In fact, cluster-based innovation has recently gained momentum in companies [14][17][45,48] and, the innovation was approachable from a general company network perspective [18][49]. Such networks encompassed communication and knowledge exchange between organizations considered an alternative approach to address limited resource gaps and help the company innovate and secure advantages in a highly dynamic competitive marketplace [19][50].
Ebers and Jarillo [20][51] emphasized industrial networks as a possible type to integrate various companies (firms, trade unions, and state agencies) with reiterative connections that supplied a specific market. Notably, innovative projects implied fundamental activities that grouped workers from various firms based on their motivations on resource diversification, risk alleviation, and access to complementary abilities or information transfer [14][21][45,52]. Collective projects within an innovation cluster were rarely indicated to be challenging as the main aim of clusters governance authorities served to facilitate the projects with necessary legal and economic resources and effective cooperation to ensure guarantee significant firm’s innovative performance [14][22][45,53]. It is a strategic option enabling firms to be with selected relevant firms by insuring a tactical positioning and being proximate to successful actors and benefiting from cost reduction, technology transfer, and economies of scale. Within the cluster organization, a significant role is played in reinforcing and intensifying the relationships between actors to achieve predefined targets [23][54].
Regarding project activities, innovations needed staff commitment for implementation purposes as learning and skills enhancement were key in driving innovation practices and project attributes [24][55]. Given that workers needed to seek and incorporate innovative projects, certain skills were essential for information detection and construction in project establishment processes. Staff commitment towards innovative project practices was reflected through organizational activity and member engagement [25][56]. The factors involved organizational members’ perspectives or attitudes towards projects and the readiness or hesitance and intention to cooperate, despite strategy and culture variances [26][27][57,58]. In this respect, entrepreneurial and creative actions were essential for innovative projects during the assessment of employees’ involvement to explore new business opportunities [25][28][56,59].
In fact, innovative projects have been acknowledged as the key determinant of enhancement and sustainability [5][29][36,60]. The crucial role of innovative projects in elevating organizational competency [30][61], resources, and profit [31][62] was deemed essential, thus requiring firms to be systematic and organized to enable the immediate adoption of novel innovation types. However, their adoption must be subject to a rigorous assessment to manage and reduce the risks linked to the company’s external and internal environment [32][63].
2. Organizational Readiness to Adopt Change
2.1. Definition of the Concept
Different terms were utilized to outline change preparedness for high adherence and reluctance involving alterations. Readiness was initially presented by Lewin [33][64] to facilitate physical and psychological changes among organizational members. Precisely, the management needed to prove that current processes or practices were no longer applicable in the corporate context to retain or achieve success. In Kotter and Schlesinger [34][65], strategies for preparedness development were initiated through education, interaction, engagement, facilitation, aid, and direct or indirect compulsion. Armenakis, Harris [35][66] outlined change preparedness through employees’ perspectives, attitudes, desires on the degree to which alterations were necessary and the firms’ capability to generate effective shifts.
Notions involving discrepancy, suitability, primary aid, efficiency, and valence were subsequently determined as change preparedness dimensions [35][66]. Likewise, Jones, Jimmieson [36][67] elaborated on the definition by Armenakis, Harris [35][66] by involving the staff perspective through the advantages obtained from the shifts. Furthermore, Eby, Adams [37][68] conceptualized preparedness for shifts as a combination of novel individual interpretations and perspectives through firm preparedness to experience shifts. Holt, Armenakis [38][69] studied literature on readiness for change. They established a novel connotation involving the critical determinants of change preparedness as a holistic attitude impacted by content (object of alteration), process (incorporation of changes), context (situations under which shifts occurred), and people (attributes of individuals who needed to change). The factors above categorically demonstrated the degree to which individuals tended to cognitively and emotionally acknowledge, incorporate, and adopt a specific plan for deliberate status quo changes.
To date, the preparedness concept has been outlined by some scholars with various connotations involving different settings, circumstances, and individuals [39][40][41][42][43][70,71,72,73,74]. The notion referred to the preparedness measure of people, societies, firms, and countries [44][45][22,26]. Specifically, the conceptualized model corresponded to the firm preparedness level. As such, Weiner’s organizational readiness for the change theory was utilized [46][23] to determine and assess the situational elements of firm preparedness to incorporate and involve collaborative innovative projects. Firm preparedness to change was defined as a multidimensional construct that demonstrated mutual employee resolutions to incorporate alterations and subsequent change-enabling capacities, thus reflecting employees’ commitment and confidence to initiate alterations. It was denoted as organizational members’ psychological and behavioral readiness towards novel practices, policies, or technology implementations [47][48][49][75,76,77].
Following Roos and Nilsson [43][74], firm preparedness for change relied on practiced initiatives (content), recommended strategies for initiative implementations (process), environmental characteristics of implemented initiatives (context), and individuals incorporating the initiatives (attributes). Firm preparedness was implied as the influencing factor of successful implementation and mediated intervention implementation efficiency [50][51][78,79]. Preparedness appeared to be an essential element in specific dissemination and implementation frameworks [52][80]. Specifically, preparedness measures could be utilized to make correct assumptions on positive changes and empirically determine particular preparedness vulnerabilities or deficiencies [53][81].
2.2. Organizational Readiness to Innovate
Firm readiness to embrace innovation was defined by Scaccia, Cook [54][82] as the motivation for change implementations, general firm capacities, and the particular abilities needed for the desired alteration. As such, firm preparedness was defined by the degree of organizational readiness and the competency for novel conceptual implementations [55][83].
Essentially, organizational readiness reflects a firm’s climate, motivation, culture, and capability to change through time [56][57][84,85]. In Castro and Martins [58][86], company climate referred to the employees’ mutual perspectives, emotions, and attitudes on core firm elements which reflected the development of company’s beliefs and standards and impacted personal behaviors. Similarly, McMurray and Scott [59][87] pinpointed the sensitiveness of employees regarding organizational climate that required improvement to eliminate participation’s obstacles. This indicated the major role played by the organizational climate in preparing for the change that can be modified to better facilitate the implementation [60][88]. In this vein, Butterfoss, Kegler [56][84] aptly highlighted firm climate as an organizational mood or a novel attribute. Contrarily, firm culture was implied as the implicit operation of values, norms, and behaviors shared by employees and challenges faced [60][88]. From employees’ perspectives, emotions, behaviors, and decision-making processes demonstrated firm culture, and were deemed crucial in obtaining strategic goals [61][89]. These goals will not be obtained without either balanced shared values and common aims, or an enhancement of collaboration and cohesion [62][90]. Finally, firm motivation dealt with the elements of inducing, navigating, and maintaining objective-based behavior, decision-making, and specific activities. Multiple theories elaborated on motivation, ranging from core instincts to self-manifestation intentions [43][74]. In past studies, Lehman , Greener [63][91] revealed that “motivational readiness” reflected the key determinant of firm preparedness for change. The construct corresponded to most psychological theories (action preceded motivation). Additionally, the self-determination theory [64][92] proposed that motivation was classified into various sub-constructs that distinctly forecasted human behavior. In this vein, firm motivation induced incentives or the absence of rewards in firm change implementations, thus demonstrating the belief in alterations and firm-enhancing shifts [54][82].
Although firm readiness has garnered much emphasis in firm change management literature [47][54][56][65][75,82,84,93], research on agricultural organizations and food sectors remained scarce. Despite much research on firm preparedness involving smart technology preparedness [66][94], nutrition-oriented value chain [67][95], preparedness to incorporate halal assurance system [68][96], and observed staff integrity [69][97], innovative project implementations and implications for (segmentation reasons) in food studies were not duly regarded. More specifically, dimensions of organizational readiness for change in the labeled local products sub-sector have not yet been examined. A consistent, accurate, and comprehensive gauge of organizational readiness is needed [70][98], not only to evaluate or be prepared for the implementation process but also to protect the “terroir” and history of the local heritage [71][72][31,99] and assisting producers to drive more revenue by working together so that the industry cannot neither cause environment issues nor to crush the sustainability of the activity.
Although readiness was not the only efficient change implementation predictor, the essential role of readiness in the positive integration of innovative concepts and technologies in firms was evident [54][73][82,100]. Typically, organizational competitive advantages collectively require external resource utilization involving projects and cooperation. Therefore, innovative projects catalyzed the collaboration process, and were underlined as one of the key determinants of organizational advancement and sustainable operations [21][52].
As innovative project planning and performance require consideration from a holistic business point of view, evaluating organizational readiness to adopt and incorporate novel alterations is considered a vital step in the introduction and implementation stages [47][54][65][75,82,93]. Disregarding the viewpoint mentioned above would potentially result in different (marketing and financial) crises and low performance.
