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Research on organizations has shown that the survival and growth of enterprises in dynamic business environments would depend largely on their ability to promote innovations within their organizations. The innovation process with its various stages of idea conception, development, implementation, and integration to the existing business portfolio is naturally an organizational process which inevitably requires intrapreneurial orientation among the employees. Above all, the entire process calls for an enabling culture and appropriate systems so that employees are motivated to take up intrapreneurial ventures. The aggressive efforts by companies from developed countries for capturing global markets, encouraged by the liberalized economic policies of the Indian government, have drastically changed the business scenario in India and probably the worst affected by such changes are the public sector companies in India. Whether in the private or public sector, companies are faced with only two options: innovate or perish! It is in this context that the present study was undertaken in large public sector corporations in India. The major objective of this study was to identify the organizational constraints against innovations. The best way to understand such issues is to interact with the innovators themselves because it is they who have experienced these constraints. The first step in the methodology, therefore, was to identify a few highly innovative projects from public sector organizations which was done by rating the innovativeness of 162 projects submitted for an innovation award in the petroleum sector. Thirty-one highly innovative cases were thus selected for a detailed study. A qualitative analysis of the cases brought out the following organizational constraints against innovation: Absence of failure-analysis systems (100%) Lack of patenting initiatives (97%) Lack of recognition for innovations in non-core areas (94%) Poor handling of change management (90%) Informal team formation (81%) Low emphasis on dissemination and commercialization (77%) Inadequacy of rewards and recognition (65%) Procedural delays (58%) Poor documentation and maintenance of records (58%) Easy access to foreign technologies (55%) Unclear norms on linking innovations with career growth (48%) Lack of recognition for contributions by support functions (45%) Ambivalent support from the immediate supervisor (39%) Inadequate systems for the promotion and management of ideas (35%) Lack of facility for pilot testing (29%). The study clearly shows that Indian organizations are yet to institute many systems and procedures required for supporting innovations. Although many of these organizations have formal R&D departments/divisions, it appears that R&D without the necessary organizational support is merely a ritual rather than the part of a proactive innovation strategy. R&D facilities and organizational support for innovation are not to be treated as independent arrangements but have to emerge from an overall innovation strategy as complementary systems supporting each other. Absence of such an integrative perspective and strategy seems to be the overarching constraint against innovations in Indian public sector organizations.

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on a research study aimed at comparing the causes of organisational decline and turnaround strategies involved in cases of successful and unsuccessful turnarounds, with a view to identifying the differences, if any, between the two groups, which in turn is expected to provide useful information to academics, practitioners and policy makers. Design/methodology/approach – Since turnaround is a business phenomenon of general interest, their stories are often published in business periodicals, which are a rich source of data on them. In order to tap this data source, the present paper employed a method of content analysis for the proposed investigation on the cause of organisational decline and turnaround strategies used. In order to quantify the data, a three-point scale was developed, where the presence of a cause/strategy is rated as “3”, its ambivalence as “2” and its absence as “1”, whose validity was assessed through the inter-rater agreement indices. The data thus generated are amenable to statistical analyses, using which the more commonly prevalent causes of organisational decline and the strategies commonly employed for turnaround by the successful and unsuccessful companies are identified. Findings – The findings of the present study have generated a few useful insights. First, the primary causes for organisational decline are the internal weaknesses of the organisation; in fact the external changes can adversely affect the organisation only if it is internally weak. Second, organisational decline caused by multiple factors (which is usually the case) can be managed effectively by adopting a variety of strategies; hence a single-pronged strategy is often found to be ineffective. Third, the more successful turnarounds had a diverse portfolio of strategies including those of institution-building, often employed in a phased manner, consistent with the stage theories of turnaround. Research limitations/implications – The limitations of this research arise mainly from the generation of data from published sources and the consequent biases, which can be managed, to a large extent, by using multiple sources for the same case for reducing the publishers’ biases as well as by having multiple raters for identifying the researcher’s biases, if any. Originality/value – The study has highlighted the need for addressing the internal causes of organisational decline on a priority-basis rather than blaming the external factors, besides pointing to the need for adopting a variety of strategies for dealing with the diversity of causes affecting the organisation’s health, particularly the need for institutionalising the changes. These findings can be of help especially to turnaround managers and policy-makers in dealing with organisational decline and thus contribute to the creation and enhancement of economic value.

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