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With focus on Uganda, this study assessed the factors influencing agro-food micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) innovations. Kampala, Wakiso, Mukono and Jinja districts were the locations of the research.

Primary cross-sectional data was collected using structured questionnaire for a sample of 521 agro-food MSMEs in Uganda. Descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis and hierarchical regression analysis were used to examine the data in SPSS.

The findings indicate that MSME innovation levels were usually high, at roughly 80%. The presence of rules that encourage innovation and reward creative people would enhance innovation that is customer-focused. On the other hand, policies and principles that encourage innovation and the conduct of internal product and process improvement research would promote system-focused innovation.

Encouraging agro-food MSMEs to develop policies that support innovation would improve the overall level of innovation, while building the capacity of agro-food MSMEs to conduct product and process improvement research would increase the level of systems-focused research.

This study assessed the drivers of innovation in agri-food MSMEs in a developing country. The uniqueness of this study is in assessing the effects of innovation support services on customer-focused and systems-focused innovations.

The study investigates the extent to which organizational learning and innovativeness can improve the firms' performance through a customer-focused strategy.

Data were collected from Indonesian financial service firms using a questionnaire-based survey. The 157 useable survey responses were analysed to test the proposed hypotheses using SmartPLS.

This study finds that both organizational learning and innovativeness have a positive effect on performance. The effect of organizational learning on performance depends on the variations of the customer-focused strategy. However, innovativeness does not mediate through customer-focused strategy to enhance performance.

In firms that implement business model innovation, managers should focus on resource flexibility. Where it is responsive, managers need to be concerned with ensuring various uses of existing resources to understand the performance effectively.

As one of the types of dynamic capabilities, organizational learning and innovativeness are also important antecedents of performance.

This study extends the business innovation model from the adaptability of customer-focused strategy. The findings confirm that organizational learning has a prominent role in meeting customer needs for a dynamic market.

The hospitality industry the world over is transforming from a product-focused, physical-asset-intensive business to a customer-focused, experience-centric one. This research aims at evolving a typology of customer-centric hospitality innovations. It attempts to explicitly capture the intrinsic DNA of hospitality innovations in the Indian context by exemplifying the typology posited with customer service innovations adopted by contemporary hoteliers that provide new ways of managing and enhancing customer experience.

This study is based on primary research through qualitative interviews conducted with select hospitality professionals, supplemented by secondary research in the form of a review of academic literature, as well as other secondary data sources such as company websites and travel websites which shed light on customer service innovations in the Indian context.

To develop and sustain competitive advantage, hospitality businesses are increasingly channelizing their efforts to provide innovative and holistic experiential service offerings. Service innovations are being tailored to cater to the unique personal tastes and requirements of hotel guests to connect with individual guests on a personal and emotional level to create memorable hospitality experiences.

Practitioners, researchers and educationists in the hospitality industry would find the implications of this study useful in the context of the present customer-centric business environment where hotels are constantly striving to meet the exponentially rising bar of guest expectations.

The research highlights that it is critical to keep the customers’ perspectives central while designing innovative hospitality products. Further, it is important to create a cadre of innovation champions and service enthusiasts who can engender a culture of service innovation within the organisation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of customer-focus on small medium enterprise (SME) performance from the perspective of a resource-based view (RBV).

This research study implemented a survey strategy to gather data from 255 respondents on the registered list of Ghana Enterprise Agency (GEA) in the eastern region of Ghana. Scales used to gather data were operationalized from previous research studies. A structural equation modeling (SEM) path analysis was used to estimate the impact of customer-focus on the performance of SMEs.

The outcomes of this study indicate that customer-focus has a significant positive impact on SME performance, hence backing the current demand for investigating the distinct influence of customer-focus on SME performance. The results show that customer-focus has a positive and significant relationship with financial performance, customer performance, internal business process performance and learning and growth performance, thus supporting the literature on the positive impact of customer-focus on SME performance. Therefore, customer-focus determinants used in this study, including co-creation, networking ties, customer insight and artificial intelligence marketing (AIM), are critical to the optimization of SME performance.

Notwithstanding the importance of this research study mentioned earlier, the study has limitations. Notably, the sample size of this study can be increased to capture SME respondents in other geographical zones that were not included in this study. Future research studies may address how business environment conditions moderate the relationship between customer focus and performance, and also the cause-effect of the relationship between customer focus and business environment conditions on SME performance.

The practical implications consist of two main items. First, this study empowers SME owners and managers to develop a customer focus technique as a central strategic goal in their quest for SME performance optimization. Second, SME owners and managers should progressively exploit the four determinants of customer focus which include co-creation, networking ties, customer insight and (AIM in order to accrue important resources for effective utilization of their customer focus competences as a way to enhance their performance.

This study is targeted at the sound development of SMEs to bring about poverty alleviation and employment. Poverty, unemployment and poor living standards are recognized as vital social challenges in most emerging economies. The establishment of customer focus as an important strategic capability provides opportunities for SME survival, profitability and growth.

Generally, the findings of this research study provide a strong backing to RBV perspective and the proposition that customer-focus and its determinants (i.e. co-creation, networking ties, customer insight and AIM) should be acknowledged as a vital strategic resource for optimizing the performance of SMEs. This research study also provides new knowledge contribution to the present body of knowledge on customer-focus orientation and management literature, particularly in the context of an emerging economy.

The article reports on anti-hierarchical approaches to managing work outside the U.S. and independent of software development as evidenced in presentations at the November Drucker Forum by the French group, Vinci and the Chinese group, Haier.

The article looks at how radical innovations in organization structure, management processes and mindsets are being adopted by companies seeking the rapid-paced, customer-focused continuous innovation needed to survive in today’s dynamic marketplaces. These approaches are spreading throughout many established organizations. For traditionally managed hierarchical organizations, the transformation often involves radical shifts in power, attitudes, values, mindsets, ways of thinking and ways of interacting with stakeholders—customers, employee talent, shareholders and partners.

The Vinci Group is organized with 3,500 business units, so that there are in effect 3,500 entrepreneurs, all intent on developing good ideas. The Haier Groups has transformed its organization into a flat platform with thousands of micro-enterprises. There are no more than eight people in each one.

The Haier platform enables the microenterprises to interact closely and intensively with users, allowing them to participate in the development and production process. The goal is to align Haier’s people and the value they can create for customer users. The need is to unleash people’s potential so as to maximize value to users.

The article reveals that when companies disrupt the traditional “efficiency-based” organizational structure the do so in unique ways. Typical of the homegrown approach to post-bureaucratic organizations, Zhang Ruimin, CEO of Haier, pioneered a management model called “Rendanheyl,” which entails three disruptions: disrupting employees, disrupting organizational structures and disrupting compensation structures.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and contrast the levels of focus on competitive priorities (CPs) between service and manufacturing firms in Greece during an economic crisis and the influence of those CPs on business performance.

Empirical data were collected from 298 company representatives of Greek firms with an approximately equal proportion of the firms being from the manufacturing (n=157) and service (n=141) industries. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to validate the proposed first-order latent constructs as well as to determine the second-order latent construct (CPs). The CPs were employed to represent the hypothetical structural relationship of business performance. The fit and predictive accuracy of the model was estimated using AMOS software.

The proposed CPs model consists of five latent constructs: quality, delivery, cost, innovation, and customer focus. It was also verified regardless of industry (manufacturing or service) that the same set of CPs was used. However, these two sectors differed on the emphasis they paid to the selected CPs.

The major contributions of the paper are fourfold. First, this study represents the first empirical investigation, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, into CP issues in the service and manufacturing industries, to determine whether there are differences in CPs between these two sectors. Second, the paper focused on the operations strategy of service enterprises in a field where the empirical evidence remains scarce. Third, the current research is conducted in a developing country with economic problems and political instability, while previous empirical research was mainly conducted in large and highly industrialized countries. Knowing about the Greek economy’s economic crisis and the CPs of different industries within it provides a unique and interesting perspective to this research. Finally, the findings introduced a set of common CPs as being applicable to both sectors (services and manufacturing), as the number and the nature of its dimensions seems to be independent of the type of sector examined.

This paper aims to present an interview with Gary Hamel asking an existential question that all long‐established firms need to face: “Is there an effective competitive response to counter innovation by startups, and if so, what is it?”.

The paper presents Hamel's evaluation of current alternatives to dealing with the issue.

The paper concludes that the most reliable survival strategy is continuous innovation, which requires radical management innovation.

Hamel concludes that most large organizations must make fundamental changes in the way they are managed, if they wish to survive. One key step: enable first‐level and second‐level employees to obtain small amounts of experimental capital or time to work on something that's new.

Hamel warns that fewer than one company out of 100 has made innovation part of every employee's job or trained every employee to be an innovator, but doing so is a matter of survival.

Veteran managers trained to respect hierarchical systems are daunted by the fundamental changes in thinking and culture that are required to implement the Agile continuous innovation approach to manufacturing. Though widely hailed by software developers it has been slow to catch on in manufacturing. This paper aims to address this issue.

To assuage managers concerns, ten prevalent myths about Agile are addressed along with a description of how the approach really works in practice.

The paper reveals that the Agile outside‐in orientation that maximizes customer value requires a reinvention of management roles, practices, values and communications to implement it.

If research is reported on in the paper this section must be completed and should include suggestions for future research and any identified limitations in the research process.

Agile is a way of forcing either high performance or change because results are apparent so quickly, not years later when the project runs out of money and the product flops in the marketplace.

The article dispels many myths about Agile and shows managers how to overcome resistance to adopting the Agile approach, which addresses the central problem at the very core of a hierarchical bureaucracy, namely, its limited ability to innovate.

This study examines the influence of different user innovator mindsets on new product development (NPD) performance. The current research explores the relative impact of a product-focused user innovator mindset vs a customer-focused mindset on feedback volume and feedback diversity and investigates the effect of each type of feedback on product improvement and product diffusion.

This study examines these relationships using two distinct types of data. Data on user innovator mindset, feedback characteristics and user innovator improvisation were obtained via an online survey. Archival data on NPD performance measures were acquired directly from an online research database, and results were obtained using confirmatory factor analysis.

The authors find that while neither type of user innovator mindset directly influences NPD performance, user innovators, who are highly customer-focused, have a significant advantage in sourcing knowledge from users in the form of a higher volume of feedback and more diverse feedback. In turn, feedback volume appears to positively influence product improvement, while feedback diversity positively influences product diffusion. Finally, the effect of both types of feedback on product improvement is enhanced for user innovators who are highly improvisational.

This research highlights the important role that customer focus plays in directly obtaining knowledge from customers (i.e. customer feedback) and the effects of that feedback on NPD performance. This study provides evidence that a user innovator's interest in accurately understanding the needs of their peers improves their access to external knowledge and enhances their innovation efforts.

Describes how companies can make managing the emotional expectations of customers the frontier of the customer‐focused enterprise.

Customer experiences have emotional characteristics that companies historically haven't been good at delivering. The customer experience is more than an analysis of hard metrics about speed, availability and information. These performance measures are critical, but real progress in shaping the customer experience comes from addressing the emotional aspects of their interactions.

The key to success is to fully understand the customers' needs and expectations. By doing so, companies can identify what the most important interactions are – key “moments of truth” – and prioritize delivery on these interactions.

By employing a customer experience framework to prioritize resources according to the impact of particular customer interactions, paying particular attention to emotional experiences, companies can build achievable operational models that create customer advocates.

Best‐in‐class companies understand the entire customer experience and use a Customer‐Focused Enterprise model to foster customer advocates while deploying resources effectively and efficiently. The six characteristics of the CFE are: customer authority, customer dialog, integrated execution, solution experience, human performance and customer focused organization.