Date of Award

6-28-2010

Thesis Type

Masters

Document Type

Dissertation

Divisions

Faculty of Business and Economics (formally known as Faculty of Business and Accountancy)

Institution

Universiti Malaya

Abstract

The day-by-day increase in competitive pressures keeps companies on their toes to continuously adapt, develop and innovate in order to excel in the stifling ocean of competition. Moreover, in today’s borderless world where boundaries are no longer relevant, where accessibility to knowledge, expertise and technology is far advanced, innovation has become a necessity rather than a luxury (Kaplan &Warren, 2007). Malaysia, among all of the developing countries in the world, is often held up as one of the few countries whose economic policies might be worth emulating. Its rapid economic growth following the industrial transformation that took place in the 1970s and 1980s has made the country evolve in recent years to be a leading country in the developing world (Ang, 2008). However, since, growingly, FDI is diverted to China, “Malaysia faces a potentially suffocating structural squeeze- neither price competitive with China nor technologically competitive with Singapore, the East Asian NICs, or the OECD countries (Ritchie, 2005)”. Developing countries like Malaysia in the past 50 years had experienced a substantial economic transformation. However, this is not enough. As the ultimate objective for Malaysia is to become a fully developed country by the year 2020; they have devised a New Economic Model in 2010 which plans a departure from the resource-based economy to an innovation-led economy. Thus, this provides enough motivation for this research to aim at investigating the key drivers of innovation performance within firms in Malaysia and highlighting the deficiencies. This study employs an empirical quantitative data gathered through a questionnaire survey from a sample of 85 top managers of the firms from the Malaysian manufacturing and service industries.   Exploratory factor analysis and standard multiple regression were used to analyze the empirical data of this study. The results of factor analysis revealed fourteen factors which underlie the eight independent variables (comprising 73 items) of this study. Later, these independent factors and variables were tested in the regression procedure. Based on the results of Multiple Regression the Best Innovation Model (BIM) comprising seven key drivers of innovation was selected. According to BIM, Internal Networking, Market and Customer Orientation, Culture and Climate, Employee Competence, Leadership and Strategy, Information and Organizational Intelligence, and External Networking best predicted the dependent variable of this study which is Innovation Performance. All seven independent variables and factors collectively explain 50.8 per cent of the variance in innovation performance. The findings of this research have significant contributions to research and practice and open new avenues for future research.

Initial

khm

Additional Information

Dissertation (M.A.) – Faculty of Business and Economics, Universiti Malaya, 2010.

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