MBA501: Analyzing Disruptive Innovation at Essendon Food Solutions

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of Essendon Food Solutions (EFS), examining its approach to disruptive innovation and strategic leadership. The report delves into EFS's internal perspectives, including human resources, organizational culture, resource allocation, and organizational structure, identifying strengths and weaknesses in these areas. It also analyzes external factors such as commitments and regulations, assessing their impact on EFS's innovative capacity. Furthermore, the report explores the marketing and technology perspectives of EFS, evaluating the effectiveness of its marketing activities, research and development capabilities, and the integration of these functions. The analysis highlights challenges and opportunities, offering recommendations for enhancing EFS's disruptive innovation strategy and achieving its business objectives. The report emphasizes the importance of a dedicated marketing team, improved R&D practices, and strategic leadership for fostering innovation and expanding in the global market.

1. Introduction
Building a disruptive innovation enable organisations to sell more products to their most
profitable customers (Coccia, 2018). The assignment would help to know the importance of
disruptive innovation strategy in creating a dynamic strategy for the company. In addition,
the challenges and opportunities in strategic leadership would be analysed with the help of
this report.
2. Internal perspective
2.1 Human resources
The promotional trends in the company are mainly due to the experience gained by the
employees and due to which, most of the people in the senior positions come from a
Microbiology background (Carrillo et al. 2015). The bad point is that the people who are
appointed the human resource managers do not know how to tackle the team and lacks in
strategy management. It is seen that the people in the workforce of the company might be
possessing the right amount of knowledge, but they do not have the requisite skills to apply
them in real life. Although about 80% of the staff in the R&D department may be the high
performing graduates from leading universities, they are not able to implement the
knowledge in practical scenario (Reardon et al. 2019). It could change it by appointing an
additional team at the corporate level so that innovative ideas could be implemented.
2.2 Organisational culture
These people mostly have a degree in microbiology, and they seem to be more proficient in
the book knowledge rather than practical skills. As a result, the strategic leadership of them
might be not so useful. It is essential to prepare for an organisational change and apply them
in the real scenarios.
2.3 Resource allocation
However, a better relationship with some of the shareholders would help to acquire the
dividends which would help the company in the high potential long-term R&D projects. In
addition, strategic buckets had to be used so that the projects have a sufficient amount of
resources to do the plan (Karimi and Walter, 2016).
2.4 Organisational structure
1

This is quite effective in the company as it had two business units which help them to be
competitive in their domain (Hossain, 2017). However, the structure is not as flexible as the
two general managers try to impose tight control over its business. The organisations can
modify their business structure to promote flexibility by creating small business units so that
the decision-makers remain enthusiastic.
3. External perspective
3.1 Commitments
The relationship with the shareholders is not so good and should be transparent in their
policies, just like Apple. As a result, the dividends should be directed towards the great
potential R&D projects (Osiyevskyy and Dewald, 2015). Even the R&D department of the
company do not have the idea of what is going on the market, and that might affect their
business operations. That is why the company should be able to access the potential impact
on the innovative capacity
3.2 Regulations
This prevents the flow of ideas which would help the company to be successful in their
endeavours (Kim and Min, 2015). In addition, if the company wants to expand its business in
some foreign land, then, it should know the regulations required in that country. This
encourages people to use their cognitive skills which are possible only if there is a
compelling strategic leadership (Yeh and Walter, 2017). The financial systems should be
improved to make the company successful, and this is possible under the influence of a great
leader.
4. Marketing perspective
The marketing activities entirely depend on the research and development department. As the
research and development department of EFS are highly knowledgeable in terms of product
invention and development, they have minimal access to marketing activities (Lee,
Kozlenkova and Palmatier, 2014). Within the organization, most of the senior staffs have a
degree in microbiology and the major marketing activities are done by scientists. The Human
Resource department also hired the staff who has vast knowledge on the microbiology. The
employees might have extensive experience in product development strategies. However, it
might be difficult for these employees to understand the different dimensions of pricing
strategies. The organization also has a lot of offers to set up the Research and development
2

joint venture that can target the Asian Emulsifier market. The organization also assumes that
there is a particular product that may not perform in the Australian market, has a vast
potential in the Asian market (Cacciolatti and Lee, 2016).
In order to meet the desired market outcome, the company can supply standard emulsifiers
through distributors. In order to expand in the international market, the organization may
require a team of technical sales executives to meet and visit international customers on a
regular basis. The managers and the members of research and development and marketing
could also individually visit the customers. The meetings will help the organizations to
eliminate the internal conflicts, poor communication and implicit assumptions. As the
combined approach of R& D and marketing department will also help in terms of achieving
the marketing objectives. The cross-functional teams of marketing and R&D will also help to
eliminate the communication gap between the two departments (Hopp et al., 2018)
5. Technology perspective
The R&D team in the company does not have the expertise to interact with the customers so
that better products are created (Ritzén and Sandström, 2017). This rightly shows the huge
problem in the product. One of the subsidiaries of the company, Essendon Emulsifiers, is not
able to perform effectively due to the absence of technical sales executives which is hurting
their business. It is even seen that 80% of the R&D staff are not able to perform at their bets
due to less practical skills and this is affecting the performance of the products (Schoemaker
et al. 2018). In order to solve the issues, the patent analysis could be used to identify
technologies from other areas and incorporate in its sector accordingly. This could be done by
improving the R&D department, where creative thinking could be applied to make better
products.
6. Conclusion
Apart from the organizational external and internal perspectives, the study also measures the
different marketing perspectives and the way marketing prospective can increase the total
sales of the organization. Based on the above analysis, it can be seen that in terms of global
market expansion, it's essential for the organization to have a separate marketing team. In the
study, technological perspectives are also discussed. The technical implications are related to
product innovation and development. Apart from product innovation and development, the
research also focuses on the various creative thinking and practical knowledge of the product
innovation strategy.
3

4