مدیریت نوآوری در کارخانه های مشروب سازی آلمان: از فعالیت تا ظرفیت؛ یک بررسی چند موردی اکتشافی

Innovation is declared as key to success in increasing competition. This study explores the innovation activities of German wineries. A multi-case survey of 25 wineries shows rich innovation portfolios with diverse activities. The innovation activities of the wineries indicate diminishing product centricity in the industry, since innovation is pursued not only for products but for services, in investment and finance, in processes, and in marketing and sales. Wineries are characterized by intensive innovation and change activities. Intensive change might be rooted in bandwaggoning effects, being pushed by trends and fads. Entrepreneurs in the wine business are urged to adapt to changes in customer behavior and to react to trends that they perceive to be important, resulting in diverse innovation ideas and change activities The self-reliance seem to push entrepreneurs and smaller companies in the wine industry to increase their innovation portfolio in without regard for capacity or resource scarcity considerations or adequate strategic profiling.

Innovation is considered a panacea to compete in today's competitive markets. Literature and practitioners ask for innovative solutions to address increasing competition and multiple changes in the environment to which companies need to adapt (Johannessen et al., 1999, D’Aveni, 1994, Denton, 1999 and Jenssen and Jorgensen, 2004). The aim of this study is to provide insight into innovation activities and the resulting changes looking specifically at entrepreneurial and small to midsize companies of the wine business. An explorative multi-case survey on innovation management in the German wine industry analyzes innovation behavior and focal areas of innovation, as well as the intensity of innovation in an industry that is characterized by small entrepreneurs. On the basis of structured interviews with randomly selected German wineries, the study delivers insights on dimensions and activities of innovation and change and first ideas on innovation capacity issues by introducing proxies to assess it. The study reveals high intensity of innovation and change activities. It therefore raises ideas for future research in the direction of bandwaggoning, capacity restrictions, and strategic profiling with aligned innovation management (Abrahamson and Rosenkopf, 1997, Abrahamson, 2000 and Abrahamson, 1991). The paper is organized as follows. Starting with a description of the German wine industry we then provide a view on the current status of research on innovation in the wine industry and a literature synopsis for innovation in the context of SMEs. Furthermore, the resource dependency theory is explained as guiding theoretical framework. In the following we provide information on the empirical approach and present the results of a multi-case survey. A section of discussion and interpretation of the results concludes the paper providing ideas for future research and also considering the limitations of this explorative study.

Despite the maturity of the wine industry and the small size of its entrepreneurs, the high intensity of innovation stated in the interviews supports that innovation is highly relevant for competition in the German wine world. Apparently, the goal of differentiation, satisfying different worlds of industries, and the extended coverage of the whole value chain of German wineries results in rather extensive and therefore high innovation intensity with complex portfolios of innovation. Given the high scores across all dimensions with slightly more intensity in the product dimension and rather equal scores for all dimensions in the future, product centricity is not as dominant as expected by the literature review. The wineries are actively pursuing innovation in all relevant dimensions and individually show a diverse and intensive portfolio of innovation. In regards to the life stage of the industry and the notion of overcoming the product centric focus we find support that the German wine industry is in transition from a market production world to “… an incipient interpersonal world of elitist production” (Sánchez-Hernández et al., 2010), requiring new and additional innovation activities. Indeed, our observed intensity of change supports the idea that the innovation requirements of each world of production rather require additive innovation activities and therefore result in more, extended and intensive innovation. Hence, it supports that the wine industry in Germany is characterized by cumulative innovation (OECD, 2004a). Overcoming industry centricity in the innovation portfolio could be a lever for more strategic orientation to differentiate successfully in the future. It could also close the apparent gap of innovation literature in the wine business and empirical evidence since the focal areas of the literature were not reflected in the interviews. Product centricity and networks dominated the literature, but were not reflected equally in our interviews. There are several restrictions of this study. Firstly, a small sample with focus on one industry in one country without longitudinal analysis limits the general validity and certainly does not deliver representative results. Furthermore, innovativeness (Salavou, 2004) of the activities has not been measured. Neglecting the newness and therefore the degree of innovation (Garcia and Calantone, 2001) does not allow to differentiate between incremental and more radical innovation, which certainly impacts capacity management and needs to be considered in future analysis (Gilinsky et al., 2008 and Hauschildt, 2004). An analysis of strategic positioning versus innovation activities would help to develop concrete recommendations for strategic innovation capacity management as well as organizational alignment and resulting strategic configurations (Remaud and Couderc, 2006 and Tidd, 2001). This study delivers some empirical data for the discussion on the impact of company size on innovation, with the interviewed small entrepreneurs stating high to very high innovation intensity. Indeed, entrepreneurs are self-reliant in managerial decisions and miss counterbalances that larger organizations possess because of different persons and roles in all stages of innovation management. Therefore, the observed units show a broader scope of innovation and an intensive innovation portfolio. As Glynn (1996) describes, the interaction of individual and organizational intelligence plays an important role in innovation management and might be missing in small enterprises. The interviews failed to provide evidence for prioritization or specific innovation clusters. Our expectation based on the RDT, that differentiation is a result of concentration on specific assets, and therefore results in different and accentuated innovation portfolios, could not be fulfilled. Although the wineries show high activity levels on innovation, no strategically induced innovation clusters were apparent. Missing support to that expectation might be rooted in the rather limited sample and our explorative approach, but in the course of the interviews we gained the impression, that the respondents intended to score high on a lot of activities and want to state innovation intensity and a rich innovation portfolio per se. There seems to be an anxiety on the part of the entrepreneurs to miss out on opportunities. In a context of small business, with resource restriction based on size, managerial, and financial capacity (Deimel, 2008), this might result in a lack of efficiency, efficacy, and orientation. For SME that want to focus and to strategically manage innovation, a capacity perspective on innovation could be helpful. There is a need to better understand initiation and diffusion of change and innovation, also in the light of networking and considering phases of more or less activity (Baskerville and Myers, 2009, Abrahamson and Rosenkopf, 1997 and Abrahamson, 2000). Indeed, further research on innovation focus and intensity, strategic positioning, and managerial planning would be valuable to overcome normative or fad advices. (Gibb and Scott, 1985 and Deimel, 2008) Our observations nourish the so called “bias of proinnovation” as stated in the literature, the rather unquestioned positive view of innovation activities ignoring possible stretch or managerial challenges of such behavior (Abrahamson, 1991). Based on the empirical interviews we further raise the concern that managerial capacity limitations might be neglected or perhaps ignored in the innovation approaches. Further research could assess possible capacity limitations as well as any bandwaggoning phenomena of innovation in the wine industry (Abrahamson, 1996, Abrahamson, 2000 and David and Strang, 2006). Given the understanding that innovation should serve the strategic positioning and foster differentiation as well as efficacy, players in the wine industry might be well advised to approach their innovation activities and portfolio strategically.