Incorporating Innovation and Entrepreneurship into Corporate Strategy (Essay Sample)

Incorporating Innovation and Entrepreneurship into Corporate Strategy Name Institution Professor Date Introduction There is a need to incorporate innovation and entrepreneurship into corporate strategy. For this to happen, there are several requirements that must be in place. This paper discusses four major requirements: ongoing environmental monitoring, an entrepreneurial climate, encouraging entrepreneurial behavior and a strong customer/stakeholder focus. Ongoing Environmental Monitoring This section seeks to answer the role that ongoing environmental monitoring plays in the incorporation of innovation and entrepreneurship in organizational strategy. Organizations are open systems forming part of a larger interactive ecosystem. Accordingly businesses, in environmental dynamics, are affected by and affect the external environment. Therefore, environmental monitoring is a very crucial tool for an organization to achieve goals and get competitive advantage within the market it operates (Sutter, et al. 2013). Corporate environment is rapidly changing. Organizations must respond to that change with innovation. Companies must engage in management of that change in the environment by perceiving it as a chance to compete, grow and sustain. The escalating speed of change is the most critical feature of the business environment in today’s world (Dogan, 2017). Therefore, ongoing environmental monitoring is important since it will provide the organization with the ability of development and implementation of organizational designs and new strategies creatively and quickly. This will enable the organization achieve competitive differentiation (Dogan, 2017). The modern-day economic environment is turbulent and characterized by radical short-time changes. Therefore, for an organization to develop an ability to play a different game through innovation and entrepreneurship, that organization must conduct continuous monitoring of the environment. An Entrepreneurial Climate This section seeks to examine the role of an entrepreneurial climate in incorporating innovation and entrepreneurship in organizational strategy. As observed above, today’s business environment is fast-moving and characterized by concepts such as flexibility, adaptability, aggression, speed and hyper-competition. Therefore, modern-day organizations and businesses must have an entrepreneurial climate in order to gain strategic advantage (Dogan, 2015). An entrepreneurial climate is created by persons working within an organization in an entrepreneurial manner, having an entrepreneurial mindset that includes innovation and creativity. It refers to a climate that dares novel procedures and ideas (Kraus, Reschke, Fink & Roessl, 2006). In a nutshell, entrepreneurship may be defined as commercializing innovations by pro-activeness and taking risks. An entrepreneurial climate is an important factor for organizations that assists businesses to successfully compete in the competitive and uncertain business landscape of modern times. Managers within an organization must create an entrepreneurial climate that encourages innovation and creativity in the employees. An organization must have management support for development of ideas, management support for risk-related undertakings and reward-based systems that offer encouragement to entrepreneurs who engage in innovation (Bayarçelik, & Özşahin, 2014). In summary, research has demonstrated a strong correlation between entrepreneurial climate and business success (Bayarçelik, & Özşahin, 2014). Encouragement of Entrepreneurial Behavior How does encouraging entrepreneurial behavior assist in incorporating innovation and entrepreneurship in organizational strategy? Entrepreneurial behavior may be understood as discovering and exploiting new business ideas for profitmaking and growth purposes (Palma, Cunha & Lopes, 2009). As explained above, modern organizations go through renewals or changes in form of strategies, products, technologies or services and economies are facing constant changes as well. From transformation to rightsizing and downsizing, these changes take different forms. The bottom line, however, is that the changes being experienced in the business arena worldwide cannot be overlooked. The level and type of change happening in the dynamic market environment of the modern world agitates businesses to come up with an updated mindset or behavior. Entrepreneurial behavior is this kind of a mindset or behavior. It takes the form of involvement in business-oriented risks, utilizing creativity and change to gain competitive advantage and aggressively competing with other businesses in the market. Entrepreneurial behavior incorporates special qualities such as general knowledge of the business environment worldwide, perseverance and judgment. Misra and Kumal (2000) developed a model that conceptualized entrepreneurial behavior: demographic characteristic; psychological characteristic; entrepreneurial environment; and entrepreneurial resourcefulness. The authors ultimately describe entrepreneurial behavior as the total summation of tasks, operations and processes related to the search of opportunities and establishing of businesses. In other words, it is all the behavior involved in opportunity searching, opportunity recognition, organization creation and launch of products for growth. Therefore, to incorporate innovation and entrepreneurship in organizational strategy, encouraging entrepreneurial behavior is important since it helps in exploiting organizational opportunities for competitive advantage. A ...