ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATIVENESS MEASUREMENT: INCORPORATING CSI AND CFI IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF A DIAGNOSTIC TOOL

Abstract

Organizational innovativeness is the latent capability of an organization that produces innovation over time. This is like any other abilities of an organization such as producing goods, services and thus it can be influenced, improved and increased with proper focus and deliberation.

The role of innovativeness in the survival of business is essential and unavoidable and yet the findings and constructs in the field of organizational innovativeness are fuzzy and inconsistent. To address this need, this research begins with two research questions: what is the current state of innovativeness measurement in technology companies? And How can a diagnostic tool help to ensure growth and success for technology companies? In conjunction with three objectives: identify and present a set of critical success indicators (CSIs) and critical failure indicators (CFIs) for technology companies to be innovative, determine how innovative technology companies position themselves to ensure growth and success in the marketplace, and develop a tool that can be adopted by technology companies to measure their innovativeness successfully.

The quest to close this research gap and provide a comprehensive diagnostic tool, the research proposes a framework that combines critical success indicator (CSI) and critical failure indicator (CFI) into the same framework to diagnose organizational innovativeness. This framework consists of five dimensions: culture, leadership, strategy, structure, and execution. And synthesizes a set of CSIs and CFIs for each dimension. This research applies mixed method research. The empirical data were collected from focus group study, semi structured interview and survey.

The results from the empirical study suggests that pursuing critical success indicators do not necessarily result in higher levels of organizational innovativeness. Rather, it is the pursuit of both critical success indicators and critical failure indicators that help organizations in enhancing their overall organizational innovativeness level. This study proposed a diagnostic tool that a business can implement to assess its organizational innovativeness continuously and devise improvement plans based on the current outcome. A simple and intuitive visualization matrix created in this research helps a business management team to draw conclusions and gain insights into innovation dynamics of an organization.