BUILDING A RESILIENT ORGANIZATION - HOW CULTURE CAN FOSTER INNOVATION IN SMALL BUSINESSES

Flexibility and innovativeness can give small businesses key competitive advantage in today 's turbulent and uncertain environment. At the same time, these enterprises have lower capacity, more constrained resources and higher perceived risk to innovate. By understanding innovation in a broader...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEconomic and Social Development: Book of Proceedings pp. 253 - 260
Main Author Apsalone, Madara
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published Varazdin Varazdin Development and Entrepreneurship Agency (VADEA) 08.12.2017
Subjects
Business competition
Competition
Competitive advantage
Competitiveness
Consumers
Corporate culture
Cultural factors
Innovations
Job enrichment
Organizational aspects
Product development
Questionnaires
R&D
Research & development
Risk perception
Small & medium sized enterprises-SME
Small business
Surveying
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Summary:Flexibility and innovativeness can give small businesses key competitive advantage in today 's turbulent and uncertain environment. At the same time, these enterprises have lower capacity, more constrained resources and higher perceived risk to innovate. By understanding innovation in a broader way and looking beyond research and development investments into organizational structures, behaviors and processes, these enterprises can enhance their competitiveness. Organizational innovation is often studied in large, industrial contexts, this study aims to provide more insights for economies that largely depend in small businesses. This study assesses the role of organizational culture - shared assumptions, values, behaviors and practices on organizational innovation - new organizational methods in business practices, workplace organization and external relations via an empirical study. It further explores, whether organizational innovation increases business competitiveness and whether it encourages implementation of other forms of innovation - such as product, process or marketing innovation. Surveying over 500 small enterprises in Latvia, this study assesses the impact of organizational culture on organizational innovation. It finds that organizational culture and organizational innovation are related, and that stronger organizational culture leads to better organizational innovation performance. It further explores, whether cultural dimensions and innovation performance differs, depending on the size of enterprise. This study also confirms that organizational innovation increases competitiveness and can become a step towards fostering other forms of innovation. The study proposes insights that contribute to theoretical and practical discussions on fostering small businesses innovation in small economies.
ISSN:1849-6903
1849-6903