Crucial Role of Innovation in Competitive Success Essay -- Business, S

Innovation has become widely recognized as a key to competitive success (Francis & Bessant, 2005). Scholars are mainly concerned with innovation because of the life requirements and the persistent desire for continuous change to be in accordance with individuals' needs and desires (Badawy, 1993). Developments in all aspects of life are attributed to innovation. Peter Ducker, one of the administration scholars, says that innovation is one of the main forces in economic and social development and a basic tool in the growing, resistance and adaptability of the contemporary organizations with the changing environmental conditions as those organizations with no innovation will shortly remove (Drucker, 1995). Leaders of businesses of all sizes and from all industries make innovation among their top priorities and concerns (Scantlebury & Lawton, 2007). Innovation is recently considered as a key factor for achieving sustainable competitive advantages and, by extension, for the success of businesses in the market (Cooper & Kleinschmidt, 1987; Damanpour & Evan, 1984; Damanpour & Gopalakrishnan, 2001; Damanpour et al., 1989; Hitt et al., 1997; Kleinschmidt & Cooper, 1991; Rogers, 1983; Subramanian & Nilakanta, 1996). The main reason is that innovative ï ¬ rms are more ï ¬â€šexible and have a greater capacity to adapt to changes. This can protect them when the climate is unstable, they can respond faster to changes, create new opportunities and exploit existing ones to a greater extent than the competition (Drucker, 1985; Miles & Snow, 1978). In the age of the knowledge and economy, the rapidly The successful changes occurring in the contemporary organizations environment are based in essence on the human source that is one of the main assets in... ... to innovate is influenced by external factors to the organization as well as by internal factors. The five innovation drivers observed by Cooper (2005) appear to be the external factors, while ITC which is proposed by Zhang et al. (2008) and organizational culture elements proposed by Schlegelmilch et al. (2003) and Cravens et al. (2002), are more internally oriented. Drake et al. (2006) identified a need for studies to examine the relative importance of various factors contributing to a firm’s innovation capability. The need was further confirmed by number of writers (Barlow, 2002; Currah, 2007; Miozzo & Dewick, 2002). This needs forming the overarching motivation for this study. This study examines the influence of organizational culture and Cooper’s five drivers on innovation capability and identifies the mediating role of information technology capability. â€Æ'