Innovation Strategies and Sustainable Competitive Advantage of Information and Communication Technology Firms in Mombasa County, Kenya

Abstract

In this ever changing environment, where firms are often faced with the challenges pursuing competitive advantage, customer is an important stakeholder in deciding who is to take the top seat. The term competitive advantage means to have an ability to perform better than any other players in the same industry. Through Innovation, firms are in a strategic position to identify market opportunities and effectively take advantage of the opportunities to build a sustainable competitive advantage. The study topic in this research is innovation strategies and sustainable competitive advantage in ICT firms in Mombasa County. The main objective of this study is to find the relationship that exist innovation strategies and sustainable competitive advantage in ICT firms in Mombasa County. The main focus is on the following four innovations strategies; Process innovation, Product innovation, Market innovation and Organisational Innovation. The research design of this paper was cross sectional descriptive survey. Five point Likert scale survey questionnaire was prepared and distributed to 45 ICT firms in Mombasa County. Out of the sample size, 35 companies participated in the survey. The Data collected and was analysed using regression analysis. From the analysis it was found that ICT firms in Mombasa County all do include process, product, and organisational innovation in their pursuit of competitive advantage. Generally it was found that innovation strategies have a positive relationship with sustainable competitive advantage. Out of all the innovation strategies, only market innovation was found to have positive and significant effect on sustainable competitive advantage at 5% level of significance. Finally the results showed that in Mombasa County if an ICT firms wants to increase the level of sustainable competitive advantage, they should invest more in Market innovation. This implies that market innovation is more effective that the other variables. This can be explained by the fact that ICT industry in Mombasa county is at it development stage. Therefore creating awareness through market innovation would expand the firm’s market share and sustains its competitive advantage. Process innovation had negative relationship with the sustainable competitive advantage. This is against the policy and the theory of innovation which implies that ICT firms in Mombasa County do not have the required competence in implementing the process innovation. It implies that to gain sustainable competitive advantage firm need to be resourced base, knowledge base and always embrace dynamic capability theory.