Managing & Developing Innovation & Creativity in Retail Sector during Covid-19 Pandemic

This presentation focuses on managing and developing innovation and creativity in the retail sector during the Covid-19 pandemic. It discusses the issues faced by the retail industry, innovative and creative solutions, research methodologies, planning and implementation, innovation audit methodology, recommendations, and conclusion.

MANAGING &
DEVELOPING INNOVATION
& CREATIVITY

TABLE OF CONTENT
 Introduction
 Overview
 Issues faced by the retail industry
 Innovative and creative solution
 Research methodologies
 Planning and implementation
 Innovation audit methodology
 Recommendations
 Conclusion
 References

INTRODUCTION
 Creativity and innovation management is an act of balancing
innovation as well as creativity at the workplace. Generating
innovative thinking can become a difficult attempt, especially at the
workplace environment.
 This presentation will put emphasis over the development and
managing innovative and creativity within the retail sector along
with analyzing the key issues faced by them in the United Kingdom
specifically at the time of Covid-19 pandemic situation.
 Furthermore, it will also discuss about the solution to overcome
from the issues with appropriate planning, selection and
implementation procedures to overcome from further challenges
with the solution suggesting for the growth and expansion of the
retail industry.

OVERVIEW
 From various researches, it has been evaluated that the impact of
Covid-19 pandemic outbreak had massively influence the
performance of several businesses especially in the retail industry or
sector because of the high leasing price rates, expansion of
overheads and ease of internet shopping.
 Studies showed lots of facts and figures in order to highlight that the
overall sales of the retail sector had been declined specifically at the
peak time of pandemic i.e. in 2020. It had been reduced by 2% from
earlier years.
 It has been recorded as one of the most declining record in the sales
volume over past various years. Moreover, with the help of internet,
the sales volume enhances by 40% during that particular point of
time duration.

ISSUES FACED BY THE RETAIL
INDUSTRY
 The major and foremost issue faced by the retail industry is related
to “Lack of footfall forcing businesses to focus over online sales”
within the United Kingdom. Because of the outbreak in 2020 related
to Covid-19, the government had forced all the businesses to shut
down and close the markets for various months.
 As a result, the businesses within the retail sector that formerly
relied on their physical stores and forefronts which were forced to
either incur additional investment or resources to their current
business website or relocate their business operations in online
mode.
 Furthermore, several businesses who were earlier relied over foot
traffic had now forced to retain their sales by shifting on online
businesses.

INNOVATIVE AND CREATIVE
SOLUTION
 The creative and innovative solution that is drawn out is the
development of appropriate strategies that assist the companies into
retail sector to put more emphasis over social media platform in
order to communicate with their customers and share content
through the same.
 With the help of such platforms, the company leaders communicate
with their customers and share information related to products,
events and services along with to network as well as assist in
communicate the company’s mission.
 Moreover, the sector also adopts core to shift customers needs,
identify and rapidly addressing new opportunity areas that are being
created by changes at the time of pandemic.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES
 Innovation Matrix
With the help of innovative matrix retail sector companies are able
to visualize innovative dimensions to come up with new services in
order to overcome from drastic challenges that had been faced by
them especially at the time of pandemic situation. Basically the
innovation consists of four types of innovation which are
breakthrough innovation, disruptive innovation, sustaining
innovation and basic research. As per current scenario, the retail
industry has to adopt sustaining innovation as it refers to further
improvement and expansion of current product as well as service
possibilities. This is basically incremental kind of innovation.

CONTD.
 Scamper Technique
The scamper technique is a kind of team brainstorming technique
utilised in order to develop or improve goods and services. It is
basically a contraction of substitute, combine, adapt, modify
purpose, eliminate, and rearrange the things. In context of retail
sector issues that has been face by the company at the time of
pandemic, the Adapt is the best way to deal with the challenges.
Basically it illustrates the things that can be added into the existing
products and services in order to make it appropriate and efficient as
per the current scenario as well as requirements. At that point of
time, the services went online which assist consumers in order to
deal with the issues.

CONTD.
 The design thinking model
Design thinking is a type of methodology that highly able to
represent a solution based approach in order to solve issues and
challenges. It is highly beneficial in order to handle complex
problems after understanding the root cause of the problem along
with the ways to deal with them into most beneficial manner. This
model is based upon five stages such as emphasize which is the
primary stage at which the consultation with the experts takes place
to find out more about the area of concern with the help of
observation. Next stage is related to define in which the information
has been combined together at the time of emphasize stage. At this
phase, the analysis has been take place in context of observation and
synthesises to define the core issues. The third stage is related to the
ideate stage at which designers are ready to generate and originate
the ideas.

CONTD.
 Planning and implementation
An implementation plan is also known as the strategic plan which consists
of certain steps that has been taken by the team members in order to
accomplish a common goal as well as objective. This plan basically a
combination of strategy, procedure, action and will also involves all parts of
the projects from its scope to budget and even more. It is generally a
document which includes all the strategies that has been used to hit a
common goal. It is a step by step guide for the ways in which the final goals
have been achieved. It is a type of action plan which make sure that the
team is doing their best in order to provide appropriate solutions to the
company and turns the strategy into specific tasks. In context of introducing
products over online platform, the retail industry have to prepare this plan
and divide it into six stages such as primarily defining goals which involves
the asking of questions and brainstorming regarding the risk scenario, the
second stage is conduct research within which collaboration of right
communication tools takes place in shared manner towards the project goals
and get feedback frpm others for final modifications.

INNOVATION AUDIT
METHODOLOGY
Auditing is basically a method in order to measure and validate the
data from various business procedures. Methodologies in context of
financial auditing have become perfected with the help of trial and
error method. It is a well defied profession based upon standards
and the measurement of conformance to these standards. As per
considering the issues that has been faced by the retail industry, the
process innovation audit has been takes place in which the step by
step actions are highly required to develop and implement an
individual innovation. In order to start the business activities over
the online and digitalised platform, there are few challenges that
have been faced by the company as well such as lack of technical
skills among the employees to develop a web store, the management
and staff have to become customer friendly in order to make their
payment and checkout procedures, creating and originating single
account for online as well as offline payments.

RECOMMENDATIONS
 As per identification of all the issues that also have been incurred
within the generation of online business in order to resolve the lack
of footfall which highly forces the retail business to become
available over online platform includes the companies’ needs to be
partnered with the right service providers and having right website
developers to the most appropriate optimizers which help in order to
make optimum performance of an online business. Furthermore, a
suitable payment gateway offers a decent transactions rate along
with varied payment modes which will highly able to resolve the
concerns. In order to tackle issues related to generation of single
account the cloud based tools must be utilised.

CONCLUSION
 From the above presentation, it has been concluded that creativity
and innovative ideas plays a major role and assist in development of
improving an existing service or product in order to optimize the
business. This allows the businesses to think outside the frame as
well as the traditional solutions. With the help of this type of
opportunities, interesting, new, potential and versatile ideas coming
up in order to make the whole concept extremely valuable. It is
greatly important to discover new services with reduced costs along
with development of process significantly.

REFERENCES
 Ciriello, R.F., Richter, A. and Schwabe, G., 2018. Digital
innovation. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 60(6),
pp.563-569.
 Henriksen, D. and et.al., 2018. Creativity and technology in
education: An international perspective. Technology, Knowledge and
Learning, 23(3), pp.409-424.
 Chaudhary, R. and Akhouri, A., 2018. CSR perceptions and
employee creativity: Examining serial mediation effects of
meaningfulness and work engagement. Social Responsibility
Journal.

APPENDIX (MIND MAP)
Creativity
and
innovation in
retail sector
Active presence
of business
over online
platform
Busy life
schedule and
Covid-19
reasoned to
online shopping
24/7 latest
informatio
n updation
Availability
of online
information

SCAMPER TECHNIQUE