A Study on Governance of Innovation in Organisation Within UAE

Proposed Conceptual Framework:

The impact of product innovation and process innovation in organization performance.

Abstract: The aim of this research is to assess the nature of innovation of organization occurring in the UAE and the extent of Innovation governance in UAE.

Design/Methodology/approach: The research will have a quantitative process by which A questionnaires will be distributed to various organizations in different cities in the UAE region. Companies will be selected using the random sampling technique. The questionnaire will contain relevant questions in relation to governance and innovation and will be focused on assessing the impact of governance of innovation in organizations in the UAE region.

Findings: The study is expected to determine the impact of innovation governance on the organization performance and explore the mechanics and characteristics of innovation governance.

Research limitations/implications: The data used in this study could be limited, and depends on information gathered from different organizations from the public or private sector and in which emirate this organization is located.

Keywords: Innovation, Governance, Organisations, Performance, leadership.

Introduction

Innovation is today considered to be a driving force regarding competitiveness, growth, and creation of value for businesses. Governing innovation is important as it helps organizations to build a system of mechanisms that they will use to align their goals, allocate resources to different projects, and, assign the decision-making authority for innovative purposes. Most companies that exist today are organized in a way that there are clear frameworks on how they can manage the business units that exist within the company, business functions, and also regional operations. However, such businesses do not have frameworks that they can use to stimulate and sustain innovation initiatives and processes (Teece 2007). Thus, organizations need to review their innovation processes and evaluate it.

Innovation governance is a comprehensive framework that helps the top management of an organization to be able to develop values, policies, and initiatives that promotes innovation. Through innovation governance, the top management, and organizations at large can be able to define the roles of their employees and the initiatives that they will undertake to realize the innovation process. They will establish a set of values to realize the innovation process. They will also define the parameters that will be used to measure innovation processes and how much regarding budget will be allocated to the innovation processes (Teece 2007). Every Leader needs to be equipped with a set of skills or competency to promote innovation in their organizations.

Management and governance in innovation is a significant competency for every leader that cannot be looked down upon. Innovation management makes it possible for organizations to continue improving their products to meet the competition in the market and elevate the national and company growth. Innovation management can be termed as a difficult task because it involves high risk and high return which makes innovation management important for every organization that seeks to engage in innovation. Poor innovation management can lead to high losses whereas proper innovation management is a source of creativity and inventiveness within an organization which helps to drive an organization competitive advantage. Governance of innovation is very important because every business organization is seeking a continuation of its competitive advantage especially in high information markets such as the United Arabs Emirates where the consumers have perfect information on different products. Therefore, for business organizations to maintain competitive advantage, it is important to promote proper innovation management and governance (Guan and Ma 2003).

When governance to innovation is implemented, it helps an organization (both the top-level management and employees) to have a clear understanding of why they need to innovate. For instance, a company may feel the need to innovate so that it can create a new business and therefore become more profitable. Governance of innovation also helps organizations to realize the various sectors of their business that require innovation. Therefore, they will focus both their human and financial capital to these specific business sectors to build on their innovation capability. In addition to that, a business will be able to determine how much innovation it wants, and therefore assess the risk that it is willing to bear in order to achieve a certain benefit (Teece 2007).

Justification of study

In the UAE, innovation is treated with utmost seriousness by both the private sector and the government. The country recognizes innovation as one factor that is pertinent to any developing nation. The culture of innovation is not a recent one; it has been cultivated for years in the UAE. The country approaches it as a factor that can increase the competitiveness of the UAE in the industrial sector. The inception of the UAE in 1971 was itself an innovation of a country made up of minds that were creative and had a lifelong observation of the country years from its founding. Indeed, one of the pillars of the nation was to build on innovation with a view of making an economic block which had more job opportunities and economic growth. The social, financial status of the country during its founding was not very profound, and the levels of poverty were very high.

The UAE is today ranked as one of the top five countries in the Global Competitiveness Index regarding its infrastructure indicators. There is also relative political stability in the country, high quality of life, low taxes, and government support to all types of businesses in the region. One of the initiatives that the region's government began to promote business is through opening up the Dubai's Department of Economic Development. It is meant to nurture any business at all stages of development, and it has led to the creation of more than 500 businesses.

The country’s vision 2021 is a proactive approach that was undertaken by the region’s government after it was affected by the financial crisis of 2008. The reason for this was, at that time, the economic growth had been fueled by the real estate growth especially in the Dubai region. The country’s government realized that relying on one sector for economic growth can have a negative impact on the country’s financial health, especially when faced that sector is affected by external factors that the country has little or no control of at any given time.

Research Questions

The conceptual framework will be built based on the following research questions:

Q1: What is the nature of Innovation taking place within the organization?

Q2: Does innovation get governed? If so to what extent?

Q3: How is Innovation governed in UAE? What are the characteristics of innovation governance?

Q4: To what extent does innovation governance impact performance?

Research Design and Methodology

The study will have a Data collection which will be divided into two stages. The first stage will be semi-structured interviews that will be directed towards various managers of organizations in the United Arab Emirates region. In this case, an interview will be schedule whereby it will ensure that he/she has adequate time to conduct the interviews and analyze the information that he/she has collected. In addition to that, he/she has to ensure that the questions that are in the interview address the research objectives that will be investigated, and also analyzed in this research. The data collection method for the interviews will be tape recorders as it will ensure that the interviewer after the interview process has ended will be able to listen to the interview again during the analysis process.

The second stage or step will be the quantitative process, and in this case, questionnaires will be used. Questionnaires will be distributed to various organizations in different cities in the UAE. Companies will be selected using the random sampling technique. The questionnaire will contain relevant questions in relation to governance and innovation and will be focused on assessing the impact of governance of innovation in organizations in the UAE region. The data that will be collected will be analyzed using the SPSS latest version

Conclusion

The importance of governance in terms of the innovation processes is vital for organizations in the UAE region because; it helps them build appropriate structures that they can use to facilitate their innovative nature. The reason for this is that the innovation and knowledge production mainly rely on the creativity of the personnel in that organization. Therefore, they have to be placed in a conducive environment that promotes their creative nature. Also, there is the need to build effective teams whereby the members of these teams have the complementing skills that they use in order to prevent the innovation process. In addition to that, another important factor that needs to be taken into consideration in terms of innovation in organizations is that; the people who are responsible for coming up with the ideas need to be effective in relaying this information to the management team in order to promote the innovation process.

References

Acs, Z. J. (2017). Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Princeton University Press. doi:10.23943/princeton/9780691148625.003.0003

Aghion, P. and Tirole, J., 1994. The management of innovation. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 109(4), pp.1185-1209.

Guan, J. and Ma, N., 2003. Innovative capability and export performance of Chinese firms. Technovation, 23(9), pp.737-747.

Teece, D.J., 2007. Explicating dynamic capabilities: the nature and microfoundations of (sustainable) enterprise performance. Strategic management journal, 28(13), pp.1319-1350.

The Official Portal of the SDGs in the UAE (2017). The UAE portal for the Sustainable Development Goals. [online] Available at: http://uaesdgs.ae/en/goals/industry-innovation-and-infrastructure [Accessed 14 Jun. 2018].

UAE Ministry of Cabinet Affairs. 2015, UAE National Innovation Strategy [Online] (Updated 4 May 2015) Available at: [Accessed 14 Jun. 2018]