Research Report: Managing Innovation for Competitive Advantage

This research proposal addresses the lack of innovative initiatives in a Singaporean management consulting company and its adverse effect on competitive advantage. It aims to identify effective strategies for incorporating innovation to stimulate new ideas and client-focused solutions. The report includes a literature review on the role of innovation, types of innovation models (linear, Teece, and open), and various innovation strategies (proactive, active, reactive, and passive). The research design employs an exploratory approach, utilizing both primary data (interviews with managers from top Singaporean companies) and secondary data (literature review). Qualitative data analysis is used to interpret the collected data, focusing on the viewpoints of managers and innovative theories. The report also outlines limitations, budget, timeline, and ethical considerations, ultimately aiming to provide evidence-based methods for fostering innovation within the organization.

Running head: MANAGING RESEARCH
Managing research
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Background......................................................................................................................................2
Problem definition...........................................................................................................................3
Management problem..................................................................................................................3
Research problem........................................................................................................................3
Literature review..............................................................................................................................4
Role of innovation on building competitive advantage...............................................................4
Types of Innovation and innovative models in Business............................................................4
Types of innovative models in business......................................................................................5
Innovative strategy.......................................................................................................................6
Research Design and methodology.................................................................................................7
Research design...........................................................................................................................7
Methodology................................................................................................................................7
Sampling......................................................................................................................................8
Data analysis................................................................................................................................8
Additional issues..............................................................................................................................9
Limitations...................................................................................................................................9
Budget..........................................................................................................................................9
Time line......................................................................................................................................9
Ethical commitment...................................................................................................................10
Expected outcome:.........................................................................................................................10

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Introduction
The purpose of the research proposal is to address lack of innovative initiatives of an
established Singaporean management consulting company. The term “innovation” in business
can be defined as the changing process or creating more effective processes, products or ideas
that will enhance the quality of the product or service offered by a certain organization and
eventually will enhance the competitive advantage of the organization. In this research proposal,
the background of the research issue will be clearly discussed initially. Secondly, it will contain
clear definition of the central question that needs to be answered through effective research.
Thirdly, the objectives of the research and review of relevant literatures that is relevant to the
research issue will be performed. Building further on that, the research design and methodology
of this project will be introduced to present the audience with an understanding of the actual
research and the thoughts behind its individual steps. After that, awareness of the risks and
limitations of this study will be raised. Finally, the main elements of the project plan, including
resources, budget and timeline will be depicted.
Background
Mr Yusuf Hoe has joined a Singaporean established management company. Soon after
joining he has realized that the company lacks innovative initiative which in turn is imposing
adverse affect on the competitive advantage as well as revenue of the company. Hence, he
understood that an organizational development initiative needs to be developed and implemented
in order to ensure development of new ideas and client focused innovation. Thus, currently Mr.
Hoe has decided to conduct an in-house research for finding out the perception of the staffs to

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the current innovation climate and find out the most cost effective and evidence based method to
innovation.
Problem definition
Management problem
“How should the Singaporean management consultancy company include innovative
initiatives in order to enhance the competitive advantage of the company?”
Research problem
“How can organization stimulate new ideas and develop client-focused innovation?”
1.1. Objectives (100)
The aim of the research is to found out effective strategies to incorporate innovative initiative
in an organization.
The objectives of the research are as follows:
 To analyze the impact of innovation on the competitive advantage of an organization
 To find out the effective tactics to implement innovative environment in an organization
 To determine the impact of innovation on the profitability, production and reputation of
the company.

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Literature review
Role of innovation on building competitive advantage
With the emergence of globalization, business organizations are constantly facing
challenges in order to gain competitive advantage over the competitors. According to
Blair and Raver (2014), implementing innovative ideas is one of the critical ingredient
that helps the company to acquire competitive advantage. However, in order to develop
innovative initiative it is crucial for the organizations to develop the capacity of
visualizing things from an unique perspective, having broad perspective, take risks and be
flexible. (Robella, Vaira and De Simone 2016) argued that promoting innovation in an
organization encourages the employees to develop innovative ideas. Implementing
innovative ideas during product or service development helps the organization to offer
the consumers with product or service that are currently unavailable in the contemporary
market. This in turn not only lowers the power of consumers in the industry but also
enhances the demand of the product to the consumers.
Types of Innovation and innovative models in Business
Business innovation are chiefly of three types, namely, product innovation, process
innovation and organizational innovation. As being stated by Veluswamy et al. (2017), product
innovation includes incorporating a new product in the market whose technological
characteristics highly differs from previous products designed by the organization or its
competitor as well as substitute products that are available in the market. Process innovation on
the other hand , is defined to be the adaptation of a new production method that posses the
potential to significantly enhance the performance of the organization. According to Charter
(2017), product innovation is highly dependent on process innovation since process innovation

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facilitates production as well as delivery of technologically developed as well as improved
product as well as services which cannot be produced or delivered by mean of conventional
methods of production. Thus it can be clearly understood that process innovation plays a major
role in enhancing the efficiency of production. Organizational innovation is referred to
introduction of changes in the form of management of an organization. (Martins, Rindova and
Greenbaum (2015) argued that organizational innovation posses the potential to enhance the
competitive advantage of an organization by incorporating new and improved organizational
structure.
Types of innovative models in business
Several innovative models are there when it comes to innovation. However, three models
associate with innovation are highly relevant to business. These are the liner model, Teece
model and the open model. Te liner model of innovation can be defined as an interpretation
of the act of innovation which is outdated but is still applied in several cases. According to
Martins, Rindova and Greenbaum (2015) the mentioned model only takes into account the
thrust of science or technology as the mean to begin innovation in an organization. Open
innovation model, unlike the liner model, focuses on the innovative strategies that comes
from outside the internal boundaries of the organization. According to Chell et al. (2016),
open innovation can be defined as the process that combines external professionals
cooperation with internal knowledge. According to Heaton (2016), modern organizations
prefers open innovation over liner innovation model since it involves opening of new
opportunities and availability of innovative ideas that flows from any source. The Teece
innovation model considers two major factors as that is crucial for the organization to incur
profit from innovation. They are the ease of imitability and the complementary assets. The

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origin of imitibility is from intellectual property, protection of technology or the fact that
imitators posses no power to mimic the technology. Complementary assets on the other side
are beyond the capabilities that an organization requires to exploits.
Innovative strategy
In order to stay competitive as well as to enhance the performance, organizations across the
world embrace innovation through innovative policies, strategies as well as process creation.
According to Asarnow et al. (2017), innovation strategies are classified into proactive, active,
reactive and passive. Organizations that follow proactive innovation strategies are more likely to
posses strong research orientation as well as fast movers advantage. The types of technological
innovations which are used during proactive innovation strategies includes radical that is,
breakthroughs that changes the nature of the service or the products and incremental that means
constant changes that leads to enhanced performance of the organization. These organizations
are found to be the technology market leaders.
One of the chief features of the organizations that follow proactive innovation strategies are
Apple, The Singapore airlines and Dupoint. When it comes to active innovative strategies, it
includes organization that defend existing technologies as well as markets while being prepared
to respond quickly. According to Cash et al. (2013), organizations using this approach posses
broad sources of knowledge as well as medium to low risk exposure. Some of the major
examples of organizations with active innovative strategies include Microsoft, British Airways
and Dell. These organizations are more likely to use incremental innovation with in-house
applied research as well as development. Reactive innovative strategies chiefly includes focusing
on operations, taking-and-wait and see approach and low risk opportunities. Organizations with

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passive innovation strategies waits till their consumers demand a change in their products or
services.
Research Design and methodology
Research design
In order to peruse the research, profound, exploratory research about different strategy of
implementing innovative initiatives in an organization will be conducted. The exploratory
research design has been chosen for the research to analyze the collected data without having
any predetermined assumptions while exploring the situation and finding appropriate
solution.
Methodology
To collect the required data about innovative strategies that can enhance the performance
and competitive advantage of an organization, the researcher will conduct both primary as
well as secondary data collection process. While the secondary data collection process will
include reviewing online articles, books, research papers as well as other relevant literature,
the primary data collection process will include conduction of in-depth interview. A
questionnaire for each of the 4 managers to be interviewed will be designed. The
questionnaire will contain 10 questions (Myers and Montgomery 2014). To analyze the data
with respect to various aspects of the innovative strategies for organizational improvement,
the researcher will follow the thematic analytic procedure under the consideration of
qualitative analysis. Qualitative data analysis process can be defined as the process where
researcher can obtain in-depth understanding of underlying reasons behind the research

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problem. It demonstrates insights into the setting of a issue. At the same time, it often
generates thoughts and hypothesis for later quantitative research.
Sampling
Considering the shortage of time, capacity as well as feasibility of the research, non
probability sampling is selected for sampling purpose. The term non probability sampling is
defined as the sampling technique where the samples are selected in a process that does not
provide all the individuals in the population an equal chance of getting selected. In order to
gather primary data, 4 managers from 3 top rated companies of Singapore, known for their
innovative strategies will be interviewed (Rubenstein-Montano et al.2015). Since the purpose
of the research is to find out the process of stimulating innovative ideas that will lead to
client focused innovation, conducting in depth interview with the managers will help the
researcher to understand the techniques they have adopted to implement effective innovation
in the company. For secondary data collection method, 10 authentic research journals,
relevant to the research topic will be reviewed.
Data analysis
Considering the fact that the research needs in-depth analysis in order to understand the
innovative methods that are used by Singaporean organization in order to gain competitive
advantage as well as to enhance the profitability, qualitative data analysis method will be
followed. Both the primary as well as secondary data collected will be first organized. According
to researchers, in spite of the fact that the samples of qualitative data analysis method is quite
small compared to that of the qualitative data analysis, they are highly lengthy and hence needs
to be organized . Appropriate organization of the data will be followed by the process of

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interpreting it. The chief focus of the interpretation will include the view points of the managers
and the innovative theories obtained from the secondary sources.
Additional issues
Limitations
1. One of the major limitations of the research includes lack of time. The whole research has
been completed within 6 weeks.
2. The fact that he managers of only 4 companies have been interviewed can be considered
as another major limitation of the research.
Budget
Tasks Budget
Questionnaire programming 600 Euro
Sample selection 600 Euro
Respondents 800 Euro
Travel costs 500 Euro
Total 2500 Euro
Table 1: budget of the research
Source (created by the author)
Time line
24th September 2018 Questionnaire designing
30th September 2018 Data collection
12th October 2018 Data Analysis
18th October 2018 First draft creation

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21st October 2018 Final draft creation
Table 2: time line of the research
Source (created by the author)
Ethical commitment
The research will be conducted in a highly ethical manner. The confidentiality of the
respondents will be maintained at any condition. Before conducting the research, the purpose of
the research will be stated clearly to the respondents. no forceful activities will be conducted on
the same. The entire research team, including third-party service providers, adheres to the
professional standards for market and social research proposed by the Australian Market and
Social Research Society (AMSRS)
Expected outcome:
It is expected that this research will come up with several innovative strategies that
posses the potential to enhance the consumer base, profit as well as competitive advantage of the
organization. Not only that, this research will enable the researcher to gain insight knowledge
about the current innovative trends in the mentioned industry.

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Reference List
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Blair, C. and Raver, C.C., 2014. Closing the achievement gap through modification of
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