Essendon Food Solutions: Disruptive Innovation and Strategic Analysis

This report analyzes the case of Essendon Food Solutions (EFS) through the lens of dynamic strategy and disruptive innovation. It examines the company's internal perspectives, including human resources, organizational culture, resource allocation, and organizational structure, highlighting challenges and offering recommendations for improvement. The report also evaluates the external environment, focusing on commitments and regulations, and their impact on innovation. Furthermore, it explores the marketing and technology perspectives, identifying issues such as the lack of a structured marketing team and the aging R&D team. The study emphasizes the importance of understanding customer insights and leveraging technological strategies for disruptive innovation. The conclusion synthesizes the findings, emphasizing the need for EFS to adapt its strategies to navigate the competitive landscape and foster innovation. The assignment is based on MBA501, Dynamic Strategy and Disruptive Innovation, and addresses the course content from workshops 10, 11, and 12, focusing on a case study of Essendon Food Solutions (EFS), and evaluates the organization's capacity to innovate from various perspectives. The assignment also covers strategic leadership aspects, identifying leadership challenges and opportunities.

1. Introduction
• Disruption is the process that could be used by small companies with limited
resources to establish themselves in the competitive market.
• They go beyond the needs of the consumers, which helps them to create better
products in their businesses.
• Making better products with the help of innovations would benefit the business in the
future
2. Internal perspective
• The internal perspective helps in examining the business model, which would
implement the disruptive innovation to tackle the organisational challenges.
• Some of the challenges are-
2.1 Human resources
One of the problems that the manager is facing in the Essendon Food Solutions (EFS) is the
inability to understand the power of disruption as they had been trained in conventional
business programmes (Christensen et al. 2015).
2.2 Organisational culture
• Whenever any challenge comes in times of disruptive innovation, then, the
organisational culture should be able to control the resistance.
• As the company gives more importance to the senior executives, the leadership is
given to the people above the age group of 53 years.
2.3 Resource allocation
• The resource allocation includes financial returns that could prevent the development
of disruptive innovation.
• The company had got a good relationship with the shareholders as it had reached a
sound financial structure.
2.4 Organisational structure
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• The organisational structure is a critical part of a company and the larger it will be,
more difficult it would be for the firm to apply the disruption innovation (Cacciolatti
and Lee, 2016).
• However, Essendon Food Solutions (EFS) is a medium-sized company with a
strength of 800 employees having revenue of 1.6 billion dollars.
3. External perspective
The external perspective helps to evaluate the external environment of the company which
involves the following-
3.1 Commitments
Organisations should have been committed to their relationships with the investors so that
they could fulfil the interests of the suppliers (Teece et al. 2016).
3.2 Regulations
• Disruptive innovation could be hindered by the cultures that could stop the flow of
creative ideas.
• It could be seen in the company where all the decisions are taken by the two general
managers.
4. Marketing perspective
• The marketing perspective can be determined as the practices that can identify the
wants and needs of the customers and also gripping the distribution of goods and
services in a competitive society.
• The customer visit programs can be considered as one of the critical objectives that
help the organization to understand customer insights.
• One of the significant issues that Essendon Food Solutions (EFS) in terms of
marketing activities are the organization has no structured marketing team.
5. Technology perspective
• The technology perspective helps in evaluating the technological strategies required
for disruptive innovation.
• However, there may be some challenges if it belongs to new scientific discoveries.
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• Another major issue in the company is that the R&D team is very old, and they have
the experience of using different applications in the Enzymetech. ‘
6. Conclusion
• The entire study is based on the various implications of dynamic strategy and
disruptive innovation techniques.
• The study also emphasizes the different internal perspectives like human resources,
organization culture, resource allocation and organizational structure.
• On the other hand, the study also discusses the various external aspects, which include
regulations, commitments
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