Innovation Strategies and Sustainable Competitive Advantage Among Kenyan Universities

Abstract

The business environment triggers need for change and innovative responses to match the organizations operation, resources and the environment; innovations can be incremental, radical or descriptive, hence the organization must be accommodative if it’s to sustain its operations optimally. The government through the Ministry of Education (MOE) has, over time, proven its dedication to growing education and having constant distribution of resources for this education sector. The Universities all over the world is going through a period characterized by radical and rapid changes as a result of influential impacts of IT and overwhelming advancement in telecommunications technology and electronic processing of data. The general aim of this research was to assess the influence of innovation approaches and sustainable competitive advantage of universities operating in Kenya. This work was anchored on two theories namely; theory of competitive advantage and Schumpeter theory of innovation. The population of this study was 40 respondents among Kenyan Universities operating in Kenya. Target respondents was the Academic register and ICT office. Analysis was done using descriptive statistics as well as multiple linear regression and correlation analysis. It was established that product innovation greatly influences sustainable competitive advantage. On the other hand, administration innovation technological moderately influences sustainable competitive advantage. The findings established the existence of a strong positive correlation between innovation strategies and sustainable competitive advantage. It was concluded that product innovation practices, process innovation practices and market innovation practices were used to a large extent. It was also concluded that process innovation was significant while product and market innovations were insignificant. The study recommends that there is need for Universities to carry out a comparison of what their competitors are offering in the market. This is because their competitors might be offering similar service with more favorable attributes. The study also recommends that Universities should control marketing expenses. This will boost efficiency.