THe Role of Process Innovation in Attaining Strategic Technological Capability

Abstract

The world is moving from an era of separate national economies to a networked global economy. The society is steadily shifting to a fast track of economic and industrial development. The advent of liberalization, privatization and globalization has brought forth profound economic, social, environmental and technological pressures on the organizations. Markets have become more open, competitive and the customers more demanding. In order to address the top competitive issues facing the industry, successful firms across the world are continuously making efforts to keep pace with new technologies. Continuous up gradation of technology has become essential for the survival of any manufacturing unit. Without continuous technology up gradation no enterprise can ever remain competitive. The objective of the present work is to analyze the technology development capabilities of small scale manufacturing industry especially the auto component industry in the state of Punjab. The following issues explored include. Present status and future scope of R&D capabilities of small scale manufacturing industry regarding infrastructure facilities, investments from government and academic institutes, reasons for low performance of small scale industry in the area of technology development, correlation between organizational characteristics with individual and group characteristics to enhance organizational creativity. The present research work is divided into three phases. The first phase consists of extensive literature survey to determine the essential elements of technology development programme. The literature reveals that to assess the status of technology development efforts of an organization, there are four key elements or areas which have to be taken care of. These include manpower for creative input, infrastructure facilities for experimentation and testing, government support to the technology development efforts and interaction of the organization with external agencies to generate innovation. The chapter also reviews the conditions that encourage creativity culture at the firm level. The second phase presents a detailed survey conducted for small scale manufacturing units in the northern region of India covering the major cities in the state of Punjab. The survey explores the present status of R&D capabilities of the auto component industry with regards to R&D policies, infrastructural facilities, investments in R&D, organization for R&D, support from government and academic institutes etc. and the reasons for the low performance of small scale sector in the area of technological innovations. The final phase comprises of a case study. The general objective of building this case study is to prove that organizational characteristics have a significant relationship with individual and group characteristics. The work has been carried out at “Preetika Industries Private Limited, Mohali”. This particular study is aimed to explore the effect of organizational climate on the employee’s creativity. The study has used the analysis of variance (ANOVA) technique in an attempt to prove that both individual and group characteristics are significantly related to organizational climate.