Organizational innovativeness: factors that drive innovations in social enterprises in Serbia

Abstract

Research Question: This paper explores factors that drive innovativeness of social enterprises in Serbia. Motivation: Social enterprises are gaining importance on global scale, being recognized for their potential to respond to both economic and social challenges, attract capital and generate income in non-traditional ways. Innovativeness comes at the hart of their abilities to achieve their goals. This research is motivated by the idea to understand which factors influence innovativeness in Serbian social enterprises, and to compare these results with the pool of 11 European countries. Identification of the factors that make the difference between social enterprises which are innovative and the ones which are not, provides a chance for business owners/managers, as well as social policies creators, to affect these factors and thus influence the boost of innovativeness and, consequentially, success of socially oriented enterprises in Serbia. Additionally, building on results of a research conducted in 11 European countries, author’s idea is to perform cross analysis of identified innovation factors in social enterprises in Serbia with previously obtained aggregated results. Idea: This paper was driven by the idea to uncover the factors that make a difference in innovative behaviour of social enterprises. Data: Analysis was conducted using responses from on-line survey of 69 Serbian enterprises. We compared these answers to those of 837 social enterprises obtained via the same online surveys from 11 European countries, including Serbia.Tools: Statistical analysis was performed (using t-test for testing equality of means, z-test for testing equality of proportion, hi-square test, Fisher's exact test and some nonparametric tests to confirm the results obtained using parametric tests). The same tests were carried out on the data obtained from social enterprises in Serbia and on the data obtained from all 11 countries examined in order to draw conclusions about the same or different influence of certain factors on the innovativeness of social enterprises. Findings: We found that consciousness about their social mission, perception of innovation as important, financing obtained via grant schemes and involvement of owners, board, customers and NGOs are the most important drivers of innovativeness in Serbian social enterprises. European pool of explored SEs report additional factors influencing innovativeness, which did not appear important in Serbian sample. Contribution: This paper contributes to the research of determinants of the innovativeness of social enterprises by bringing original field data from Serbia, and by providing comparison with the same pool factors examined in the sample of European countries.

What creates the innovative organisational design in Science and Research Organisations (SROs) in Serbia: The influence of strategic project management factors

“…It is a significant challenge to develop a comprehensive framework for strategically managed scientific and research work in SROs. There is a consensus in the literature that organisational innovativeness is crucial for long-term sustainability [66]. According to the literature, we incorporated the strategic and project management components in our model [63], [98] to examine their influence on an innovative organisational design.…”

Organizational Factors of Innovativeness in Serbian Enterprises

“…In the literature review, as part of creating the so-called hierarchical model of corporate entrepreneurship maturity, Vučković et al (2017) highlight the following factors as key to the effectiveness of this process: organizational culture (promoting innovativeness at all levels of the organization, participatory leadership, risk taking and work motivation), organizational infrastructure (includes the flat organizational structure, then clear and concrete policies, strategies, plans and procedures for innovation management in the organization, and finally the simple and clear communication channels for information exchange within innovation management), organizational resources and abilities (sufficient human, material and financial resources, necessary for the implementation of new ideas in the organization). When it comes to research on this topic in Serbia, Miric et al (2019) conducted a study of factors affecting organizational innovativeness in social enterprises in Serbia. They concluded that some of the most important factors in this regard are awareness of the enterprise's social mission, perception of innovation as important, orientation towards growth, motivation to work, professional life satisfaction, etc.…”