DOI: 10.5176/2251-2038_IE13.05
Authors: Ashish Hajela
Abstract: Innovativeness is critical for business performance. In the continuously changing environment, innovativeness needs to be sustainable and competitive for ensuring sustained competitive advantage to firms. The paper explores how firms can have high sustainable innovativeness and high competitive innovativeness. The paper draws from concepts of absorptive capacity and adaptability and uses case based methodology. The paper discovers that traditional sources of innovativeness- internal sources, organized markets and non-existing markets- enable firms to have high sustainable innovativeness but low competitive innovativeness. The unorganized markets, due to their dynamic business opportunities, enable both high sustainable innovativeness and high competitive innovativeness. Firms require moderate blend of both adaptive capacity and absorptive capacity for high innovativeness. The paper encourages practitioners to source innovativeness from unorganised markets.
Keywords: Innovativeness, Unorganised Markets, Sustainable, Competitive
