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Top1. Introduction
Modern-day businesses are essentially driven by digital capabilities and innovative approach towards value creation and competitive advantage. Business leaders globally are challenged with myriad possibilities of establishing and sustaining business capabilities, irrespective of the size and industry. Among them, innovation is seen as topmost weapons to create, deliver and capture the business value. This implies redesigning of business models for better value creation and value delivery as a response to addressing business challenges and advocating solutions for business growth. Challenges for innovating business models by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are quite different compared to larger organizations. SMEs are seen as primary contributors to the economic wealth of the nations in many vertical industries in recent times. Especially SMEs with service business focus are facing challenges due to a lack of clear frameworks and metrics for practical application to measure their own innovation capabilities. Though there is no dearth of knowledge around innovation and entrepreneurship, a concentrated approach to measuring and driving business performance is not yet fully mature. One of the recent studies in this domain has come with a practical framework with four dimensions in the first order and three dimensions in the second order. As per this business innovation framework, the first order dimensions are Value, Innovation, Digital and Enterprise thus making up VIDE part and the second order dimensions are Leadership, Enablement and Orchestration thus making the LEO part (Venkatesh & Singhal, 2019). This VIDE-LEO business innovation framework provides a definitive set of innovation metrics triangulated in terms of innovation culture, engagement, collaboration, enablers and innovation metrics that can be applied to all business firms, especially in case of SMEs. To appreciate the usefulness of this framework approach, there has to be some results of validation by subjecting them to real world business cases. While attempting to this validation and its associated metrics, there are two research questions that arise.
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RQ1: How the suggested VIDE-LEO dimensions and innovation metrics are perceived and understood by SMEs in the Information Technology – Business Process Management (IT-BPM) business in Indian context?
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RQ2: What business metrics shall be more practical and important as measure of innovation performance for SMEs with managed services business model focus?
To address these research questions, this particular study has resorted to a multiple case design approach attempted to validate the different innovation metrics of VIDE-LEO model. Metrics and scores used in the context of case companies are as per VIDE-LEO dimensions as discussed in the next section. Accordingly subsequent section gives a full account of literature review that support the innovation metrics. Subsequent section deal with research methodology employed to validate this novel innovation framework with reasoning for the choice of multiple case design approach. Discussions and conclusion that follow describes in detail the results of within case and cross case analysis of twelve case companies in three groups for further inference and application. Theoretical and practical implications are covered in the concluding sections with reference to what can be further taken up to improve the suggested framework.
Top2. Theoretical Background And Context Of The Business Innovation Conceptual Model
Recent studies on managing innovation performance in terms of business model elements and arranging them as an integrated framework are indicating how innovation can bring business resilience (Buliga, Scheiner & Voigt, 2016; Bican & Bren, 2020). Contemporary innovation frameworks mostly approach the innovation from research & development mindset and the innovation metrics are more related to new product development with the use of new generation technologies. VIDE-LEO business innovation framework proposed by Venkatesh and Singhal (2019) stresses on the significance of innovation metrics triangulated in terms of innovation leadership, enablement and orchestration. This framework is argued to be first of its kind to describe and articulate business models and business innovation in a comprehensive and practicable manner. However, generalization and practical application of this framework need to be supported with a structured validation. Accordingly, this study is an attempt to validate VIDE-LEO business innovation framework by multiple case design.