Kladensky, T. (2016). Development of an innovation strategy : based on an example of an electric wholesale trader [Master Thesis, Technische Universität Wien; Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien]. reposiTUm. https://doi.org/10.34726/hss.2016.37654
This master thesis describes a typical way of how an innovation strategy can be build up within an organization and mainly on which major cornerstones a chief innovation officer or other relevant people in a company must focus on to increase the competitiveness of an organization. Starting with a basic descriptions of what innovation is and what different kinds are available, the thesis concentrates strongly on different approaches of innovation strategies since this is a core question to each organization. Whether one organization want to focus on a more market oriented strategy, others would like to use a more technological oriented strategy to increase their competitiveness. Nevertheless, all of them can be true and have to be taken into consideration which is a major part of the thesis. After talking about different orientations it goes directly into a comprehensive description of the main steps to develop a strong and sustainable innovation strategy that perfectly fits to the organization. It focuses on a top-down method from defining a vision, followed by setting up the fundamental growth strategy and finally over several other steps to define your future core competencies and setup your implementation plan. To be able to go through all major steps of developing an innovation strategy several tools are needed to analyze your external and internal environment. Tools like Porter-s five forces, stakeholder analysis, value chain analysis and finally the resulting SWOT helps to deeper understand each component of a department or the whole organization and how it reacts within their environment. At the very first time of implementing an innovation strategy it is advisable to develop a control management system that helps to get the big picture of all your innovation relevant activities over time and how the strategy is on track. Based on this mass of information everything was applied to a practical example of a wholesaler in the electrical market. Starting from analyzing the whole situation, understand the market, the customers and competitors it was a goal to identify business and technological trends and define the impact to the existing organization. For those trends that had the biggest impact on the organization a compact business opportunity including definition of future core competencies is the result of this comprehensive master thesis.