An Analysis of Business Innovation at WestPac Australia

This report analyzes business innovation at WestPac Australia, focusing on the company's enablers and barriers to innovation. The introduction highlights innovation enablers like organizational culture and collaboration, and barriers such as the fear of change. The report uses literature on the six building blocks of innovative culture and the Australian government's innovation plan. The methodology section describes the use of primary and secondary data, including surveys and interviews with WestPac employees. The discussion section identifies WestPac's enablers, such as culture, leadership, and a strong R&D team, and barriers like resistance to change and economic problems. The findings suggest that WestPac should strengthen its enablers and overcome its barriers. The report concludes with recommendations for WestPac to improve innovation and suggests areas for future research, such as finding ways to mitigate barriers and exploring resource accessibility. The references include articles and websites used for research.

Running head: BUSINESS INNOVATION
BUSINESS INNOVATION
Name of Student
Name of University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction..........................................................................................................................3
Literature Study...................................................................................................................3
Methodology........................................................................................................................5
Discussion............................................................................................................................6
Findings...............................................................................................................................7
Recommendations and conclusion......................................................................................8
Recommendations for future research.................................................................................8
References............................................................................................................................9

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Introduction
Innovation enablers refer to all those factors that enable an organization towards
changing easily such that innovative practices can be carried out. There are several factors that
act as enablers such as the organizational culture, climate, collaboration among the employees
and others. There are also certain factors that act as barriers to carrying out any innovative
change in the organization such as the fear of change or the blocked mindedness of the
employees and others. The company chosen for the purpose of this study is WestPac Australia
that is basically dealing in providing banking and financial services to its customers with a vision
of helping the communities and customers in achieving prosperity and growth by providing
financial services (Westpac.com.au 2019). The main aim of the paper is to discuss about the
enablers and barriers to communication for the chosen company and make recommendations
related to the same.
Literature Study
The concept of the six building blocks of innovative culture has to be understood in order
to understand the enablers of innovation. According to the theory there are six main factors that
determine the innovativeness of the company and is related to the company culture.

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Figure 1: The six building blocks of culture
Source: (sloanreview.mit.edu 2019)
From the above diagram, it can be seen that the six factors are- resources, values,
processes, behaviors, climate and success. Values refer to the way a company spends its money
and time and its takes decisions on the basis of the same. Those enterprises that are successful
have the values of creativity, continuous learning and supporting the entrepreneur spirit in the
organization. Behaviors refers to the way people act in case of innovation for instance the leaders
may act in way to energize the employees through a description of the future and thereby to
reduce the red Tape. For the employees it may include overcoming their blocked mindedness and
dogmatism (sloanreview.mit.edu 2019). Climate refers to the way people feel about their
organization and these factors that create the climate may have a major impact on the employees.

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Resources comprises of people, projects and systems. The most important of these resources are
the people who have an impact on the climate and values of the organization. The processes
comprises of the innovation route as they are developed. The innovation success occurs at three
main stages or levels: enterprise, personal and external (industry.gov.au 2019).
External factors include the perception of the customers about the company and the
perception of the competitors about the company. For this purpose, the assessment of the
organizations culture has to be done this includes- factors such as openness, trust, integrity and
other factors. In order to measure the innovativeness of the companies there needs to be some
type of innovative quotient that will be used as a benchmark for the organization and will be
determined by the performance of various departments across different regions. There are
various barriers to change that needs to be overcome in order to carry out the innovative change
in the organization. Some of these barriers are the fear of becoming obsolete, the fear of losing
power and position, blocked mindedness and dogmatism of the employees and various other
factors. There may be inconsistencies between the actions and the thoughts (Herrera 2016).
The Australia government has introduced the Australia 2030- prosperity through
innovation plan and there are 30 recommendations under the same to improve the innovativeness
of the organization of Australia and it basically covers the five strategic areas such as- industry,
education, government, ambition and culture and research and development.
Methodology
The study is dependent upon the data collection from both the sources primary data and
secondary data. The primary data is going to be collected from the employees of the organization
through surveys and interviews and the secondary data on the other hand is collected from online

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sources. Simple random sampling method will be used for the purpose of the study because
about 100 employees of the organization will be requested to take part in the survey and about 50
employees will be interviewed for this purpose. The quantitative data collected from the survey
will be converted into numerical values and figures for the purpose of comprehending the data
and then it will be statistically represented in order to achieve a graphical representation. The
qualitative data collected through the interviews will be analyzed using thematic methods and the
information gathered through the interview will be written appropriately using different themes.
There are different ethical factors that need to be considered such as seeing that there is no
plagiarism in case of secondary data collection and in case of survey it should be seen that
people willingly give their feedback and no form of coercion should be used for this purpose. It
should be seen that confidentiality is maintained (Katsigiannis, Agarwal and Jin 2015).
Discussion
The organization chosen for the purpose of the study is that WestPac Australia. Some of
the most critical enablers for the organization are that of-culture, leadership and a strong research
and development team at WestPac. It was named as one of the most innovative companies of the
year 2012 by the BRW. This is so because they have a culture of innovation in the organization
where people are motivated to innovate different products or services or offerings such that the
customer service can be improved. The main objective of the company is to provide best
customer services and therefore they aim at achieving the same through have an innovative
culture. The leadership at WestPac is also acts an enabler such that the leaders are able to create
a dedicated team of employees using their capabilities to form innovative teams in the
organization and therefore helping in providing innovative products and services to the
customers (Hussein et al. 2016). A strong innovation and implementation team is also acting as

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an enabler for the organization as they have recently innovated the system of automatic payment
information in the bank statement with the invoices of the individuals and this has simplified the
payment process for the customers (Raghunathan and Maiya 2017). The company is the only
bank in Australia that has wholly owned software for payment that enables the company to
deliver faster, innovative and flexible solution to the company.
Some of the major barriers are- resistance to change due to different fears blocks
mindedness of the employees to changing technology and economic problems faced by the
company. Resistance to change also occurs in the company because of various fears such as- the
fear of change itself, the fear of becoming obsolete, people have the fear that they may become
useless if technological innovations take place in the organization, there are fear of failure-
people are often afraid that the innovations may not become successful and as a result the
company may go into losses (Loewe and Dominiquini 2006). Some of these fears are the major
reasons for resistance to change. People are sometimes block minded to technological changes
taking place in the organization because they are not shared complete information or due to lack
of the ability to show them the big picture. The company WestPac is presently facing problems
of fall in market share and therefore revenue and the dividends revenue is also going to remain
subdued. This has negatively affected the company to invest into technology that requires
immediate payment for the purchases and therefore the company cannot the advantage of the
technological opportunities in the market (Sanders et al. 2015).
Findings
From the above data it can be said that WestPac has the opportunity to maintain its
position as one of the best innovative companies in Australia by overcoming its barriers to
resistance that is the resistance to change, blocked mindedness and economic problems faced by

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them. The company should try to strengthen its enabling factors that are culture, leadership and
innovation team.
Recommendations and conclusion
From the above discussion it can be concluded that every company faces different
enablers and barriers to innovation. The company chosen for the purpose of this study is
WestPac and the paper discusses about its enablers and barriers to innovation. Some of the main
enablers of the company are-its culture, leadership and innovation and implementation team and
some of its barriers are- resistance to change, blocked mindedness and economic issues. The
company can change the blocked mindedness of the people by proving them with sufficient
information such that they can understand how taking the help of technological innovation can
ultimately lead the growth of the company and therefore the welfare of the employees (Bajada
and Trayler 2015). There should be free communication in the organization, such that all fears
can be overcome.
Recommendations for future research
Future research can be carried out in areas where ways of overcoming or reducing the
barriers can be found out. In this paper the barriers have mainly been focused and much
discussion has not been done for ways in which the barriers can be overcome. Resources are also
a very important factor in determining the success of the study. Many resources were not
accessible and therefore a future research can be conducted with more resources. There have
been issues related to obtaining the permission of employees due to which there was lack of
access to sufficient information.

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References
Bajada, C. and Trayler, R., 2015. Technology-driven service innovation in the banking industry.
In The Handbook of Service Innovation (pp. 319-343). Springer, London.
Herrera, M.E.B., 2016. Innovation for impact: Business innovation for inclusive growth. Journal
of Business Research, 69(5), pp.1725-1730.
Hussein, A.T.T., Singh, S.K., Farouk, S. and Sohal, A.S., 2016. Knowledge sharing enablers,
processes and firm innovation capability. Journal of Workplace Learning, 28(8), pp.484-495.
industry.gov.au 2019. Innovation and Science Australia. [online] Department of Industry,
Innovation and Science. Available at:
https://www.industry.gov.au/strategies-for-the-future/innovation-and-science-australia [Accessed
27 Aug. 2019].
Katsigiannis, T., Agarwal, R. and Jin, K., 2015. Business model approach to public service
innovation. In The Handbook of Service Innovation (pp. 751-778). Springer, London.
Loewe, P. and Dominiquini, J., 2006. Overcoming the barriers to effective innovation. Strategy
& leadership, 34(1), pp.24-31.
Raghunathan, B. and Maiya, R., 2017. Digital Innovations for the Consumer. In SMACing the
Bank (pp. 203-254). Auerbach Publications.
Sanders, M., Zeng, J., Hellicar, M. and Fagg, K., 2015. The power of flexibility: A key enabler
to boost gender parity and employee engagement.

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sloanreview.mit.edu 2019. How Innovative Is Your Company’s Culture?. [online] MIT Sloan
Management Review. Available at: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-innovative-is-your-
companys-culture/ [Accessed 27 Aug. 2019].
Westpac.com.au 2019. Westpac named one of Australia's most innovative companies | Westpac.
[online] Westpac.com.au. Available at:
https://www.westpac.com.au/about-westpac/media/media-releases/2012/6-december/ [Accessed
27 Aug. 2019].