Innovation Capabilities : Teams’ perception of strengths and critical gaps

Abstract: To be competitive, firms must constantly introduce new and better products and services. Thus itis crucial for firms to create an organization in which both incremental and radical innovationsoccur. In an organizational context, innovation capability refers to the capability to integrate thekey resources and capabilities of the organization in a way that stimulates innovation in products,services and processes. Consequently, firms must support the underlying processes and practicesthat aim at improving the innovation capability. To provide the necessary support for innovationactivities, firms must also consider the conditions of each specific team, as the support neededdepends on the situation in the respective teams.This study was performed as a Master thesis project at The Royal Institute of Technology. It isbased on an empirical study performed at a large Swedish firm during 2012. The purpose of thestudy was to investigate and map how teams within the firm perceive their innovation capability.The sample consisted of around 200 respondents in 13 different teams. The teams were from twodifferent product units, and were located in five different countries. To collect data about theteams included in the survey, a web-based survey tool was developed. In the survey, respondentsgot to choose three capabilities they perceived as strengths of the team, and three they perceivedas gaps critical to address. Complementary interviews were also held with members of thestudied teams to further discuss the survey results. By using this approach, the perceivedstrengths and critical gaps of each team was identified.The results show that at an overall level there are great similarities between the different teams,as some capabilities were perceived as top three strengths in a majority of the teams. Looking atthe critical gaps the responses were more evenly distributed, although some capabilities stillscored significantly higher than others. No major differences were found between differentproduct units or countries. One important finding was that within each team, there were greatdifferences in how the team members perceived their team’s strengths and critical gaps. Thisimplicates that the teams need to become more consistent on these issues, as an effective changework depends on a mutual understanding of the needs of the team.