Background

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.

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 the current innovation climate and find out the most cost effective and evidence based method to innovation.

“How should the Singaporean management consultancy company include innovative initiatives in order to enhance the competitive advantage of the company?”

“How can organization stimulate new ideas and develop client-focused innovation?”

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.

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.

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 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.

Problem Definition

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 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.

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 passive innovation strategies waits till their consumers demand a change in their products or services.

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.

Management Problem

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 problem. It demonstrates insights into the setting of a issue. At the same time, it often generates thoughts and hypothesis for later quantitative research.

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.

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 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.

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.

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)

24th September 2018	Questionnaire designing
30th  September 2018	Data collection
12th  October 2018	Data Analysis
18th  October 2018	First draft creation
21st  October 2018	Final draft creation

Table 2: time line of the research

Source (created by the author)

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)

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.

Reference List

Asarnow, J.R., Kolko, D.J., Miranda, J. and Kazak, A.E., 2017. The pediatric patient-centered medical home: innovative models for improving behavioral health. American Psychologist, 72(1), pp.13.

Blair, C. and Raver, C.C., 2014. Closing the achievement gap through modification of neurocognitive and neuroendocrine function: Results from a cluster randomized controlled trial of an innovative approach to the education of children in kindergarten. PloS one, 9(11), pp.e112393.

Cash, D.W., Clark, W.C., Alcock, F., Dickson, N.M., Eckley, N., Guston, D.H., Jäger, J. and Mitchell, R.B., 2013. Knowledge systems for sustainable development. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 100(14), pp.8086-8091.

Charter, M., 2017. Greener marketing: A responsible approach to business. Routledge.

Chell, E., Spence, L.J., Perrini, F. and Harris, J.D., 2016. Social entrepreneurship and business ethics: Does social equal ethical?. Journal of business ethics, 133(4), pp.619-625.

Heaton, D.P., 2016. An innovative approach to cultivate responsible next generation leaders: Transcendental Meditation in management education. In Innovative management education pedagogies for preparing next-generation leaders (pp. 139-160). IGI Global.

Martins, L.L., Rindova, V.P. and Greenbaum, B.E., 2015. Unlocking the hidden value of concepts: a cognitive approach to business model innovation. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 9(1), pp.99-117.

Myers, R.H. and Montgomery, D.C., 2013. Response surface methodology: process and product optimization using designed experiments (Vol. 4, pp. 156-179). New York: Wiley.

Robella, M., Vaira, M. and De Simone, M., 2016. Safety and feasibility of pressurized intraperitoneal aerosol chemotherapy (PIPAC) associated with systemic chemotherapy: an innovative approach to treat peritoneal carcinomatosis. World journal of surgical oncology, 14(1), pp.128.

Rubenstein-Montano, B., Liebowitz, J., Buchwalter, J., McCaw, D., Newman, B., Rebeck, K. and Team, T.K.M.M., 2015. A systems thinking framework for knowledge management. Decision support systems, 31(1), pp.5-16.

Sekaran, U. and Bougie, R., 2016. Research methods for business: A skill building approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Veluswamy, H.P., Kumar, A., Kumar, R. and Linga, P., 2017. An innovative approach to enhance methane hydrate formation kinetics with leucine for energy storage application. Applied energy, 188, pp.190-199.