Recommendations for UK Firms Facing Innovation Competition

Recommendations of For UK Firms Facing Innovation Competition
Your Name
Department of ABC, University 
ABC 101: Course Name
Professor (or Dr.) Firstname Lastname
Date
Recommendations of For UK Firms Facing Innovation Competition
Introduction
With the modern business world increasingly competitive, companies are turning to innovation as a critical competitive advantage. Competitive advantage refers to the conditions or circumstances that puts an organization in a superior and desirable business position against other players in the market. Through innovation, organizations want to make things faster, cheaper, and better than their competition. Central to innovation is organizational culture. According to Shayah and Zehou (2019), companies are only innovative if they have an organizational culture that encourages creativity. Organizations seeking to innovate to strengthen their competitive advantage must change their cultures to accommodate innovation demands (Trotter & Vaughan, 2012). Thus, organizational culture, innovation, and change management are three core business domains that work hand in hand to sustain a business in a competitive environment. In this view, the current paper seeks to discuss the relationship between culture and innovation and the role of change management in making this relationship productive.
State of Innovation Among UK Firms
In the UK, companies are increasingly investing in innovation to stay relevant. A recent survey involving 750 senior decision-makers established that 71% have resources and a budget for innovation (Basul, 2019). A further 56% have a department or team focusing on innovation. Among these, 75% have these teams meet at least monthly with discussions on innovation. In a different survey, Ismail (2017) established that 66% of UK business executives believe innovation is crucial to survival. If anything, these figures suggest that innovation is a priority for most UK businesses. However, Basul (2019) survey also revealed key barriers to innovation. For instance, more than 62% of executives interviewed complained of lengthy bureaucracy before new ideas are given the go-ahead. Furthermore, most executives report that businesses are too risk-averse to embrace innovative ideas, with a further 51% thinking that time constraints limit innovation (Strachan, 2021). According to van Ark and Venables (2020), these barriers to innovation have partially contributed to
Data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) shows that if the pre-2007 productivity trend had continued, the current rate of productivity in the UK would be 16% higher. Accordingly, living standards and wages would be higher (ONS, 2015). Recovery from previous economic downtowns was marked by increased productivity. But in the case of the 2008 crisis, productivity has flattened out, marked by increased working hours. According to the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), the UK struggles with the productivity puzzle because companies struggle with innovation (UKCES, 2016). These findings are supported by Basul (2019), who established that 37% of UK organizations had attempted and failed to implement new technology in the previous year.
Graphene, for instance, was invented in 2002 by researchers at the University of Manchester (van der Merwe, 2020). Although graphene has many uses across industries like automaking and construction, the UK lags in capitalizing on the opportunity (Alqarni, McLaughlin, Al-Ashaab, & Aziz, 2022). As of March 2021, 275 UK graphene-related patents were listed on Patentscope. In contrast, China had nearly 60,000 while the US had over 6000 (Strachan, 2021). In other words, UK's struggling innovations have contributed to the Productivity Puzzle.
Relationship Between Organizational Culture and Innovation
What these figures suggest is that UK organizations need a change in their organizational cultures for the country to sustain its reputations as an innovation hub since the 1st industrial revolution. This means that organizational change management and organizational cultural changed are key areas that these organizations should work on. Change management and organizational culture are topics that have been researched and discussed at length by researchers and scholars in the fields of business and psychology.
Gorzelany et al. (2021) for instance, investigated the relationship between organizational culture and innovativeness. Researchers focused on four universities in Poland, Australia, Ukraine, and Germany. Data was gathered using a survey questionnaire. This method was ideal because it helped capture the unspoken rules or behaviors that either encourage or suppress innovation within the selected universities. Conclusions showed that innovative opportunities are nurtured within organizational cultures supporting innovation through both unspoken and spoken organization rules. Accordingly, while the spoken rules, such as mission & values may provide a guide and shape innovative mentalities, unspoken or unwritten modes of behavior were considered the most significant.
In agreement with these findings, Bendak et al., (2018) concluded that innovation-oriented organization culture strengthens the elements of innovation. In other words, innovation is a key factor that influenced long-term success and therefore, organizations that nurture such a culture become innovative in the long run. In their proposal and validation of a framework for an innovative culture, Bendak et al. (2018) listed several core elements that should be considered. It was established that innovative mission and vision statements, safe spaces, democratic communication, collaboration, flexibility, leadership, incentive, and boundary spanning are core to an innovative culture. These elements are consistent with Gorzelany et al. (2021)’s findings on implicit and explicit factors that foster innovation. While this research painted an image of the elements that must co-exist for an innovative culture to reign, it did not discuss how implicit factors develop since most organizations already have explicit factors like mission and vision statements.
Each of these elements has been studied independently by an array of researchers. For example, Mokhber et al. (2017) investigated the influence of transformational leadership on organizational innovation. In this study, sixty-three companies were sampled from Iran's top 100 business organizations to participate in the study with interviews as the main data collection tool. Findings showed that transformational leaders encourage innovation and ensure the innovation's success in the market. The use of interviews was ideal because the method allows in-depth collection of data and allows for follow up questions as clarification. Thus, these findings are ideal in shaping an innovative culture within an organization. On the other hand, the results are questionable because they focused only on executives. Focusing on employees would have provided a different perspective in the sense that it is only employees who can tell whether the environment they are working in allows creativity.
In terms of long bureaucratic processes, McCausland (2022) posited that while such processes enhance accountability, they also introduce multiple gatekeepers in the innovative process. In McCausland (2022)’s study, the literature review converged to the conclusion that for an organization to be innovative, it must deliberately develop an innovative culture. Such a culture must limit gatekeepers. Where such gatekeepers are necessary for accountability reasons, they should provide open and transparent channels of communication that will accommodate trial and error in the UK's risk-averse organizations.
Innovation mission and vision statements are part of a larger organization's strategy towards innovation to remain relevant and competitive. Looking into the role of organizational strategy, Soomro et al. (2020) concluded that strategic factors like mission, vision, and values positively and significantly impact organizational innovation. These factors include a shared vision, transformational leadership, personal mastery, and the environment. Thus, an organization that values innovation will invest in these factors. Findings by Soomro et al. (2020) emphasize the role of culture in promoting innovation and reiterate Mokhber et al. (2017 'ss conclusions on the role of transformational leadership. This shows that individual factors that drive innovation comprise organizational culture.
On the other hand, the same way organizational culture supports innovation is the same way it kills innovation. This is particularly important in today's tech-powered world, where innovation is taking place at an astronomical pace. An organizational culture that does not support this change is more likely to stifle the competitiveness of any organization. For example, an organizational culture that enables employees and leadership to cling to the status quo cannot breed innovation. According to Bendak et al. (2020), resisting change while clinging to the status quo is among the critical innovation barriers in UK organizations. These outcomes are consistent with Basul's (2019) findings on bureaucracy and the limited time allocated to innovation programs and activities. Further, these findings insist on the importance of organizational cu...