Flexibility in operations and business innovation

In order to develop new vision and innovate products and businesses for dynamic markets, firms need to consider various drivers of change within and from the environment, and the way in which they interact with each other. The resource based view falls short, in that it does not explicitly address competencies in organizational capabilities and market orientation. In this study, starting with a proposal to bring stratification to the resource based view, whereby internal resources and the external orientation can be separated, constraints at operations and business level have been identified for meeting the drivers of change. The stratification facilitates prescribing operations enablers, which function as drivers of operations flexibility for innovation. The resulting operations performance, when added with environmental constraints, demands suitable business enablers, or drivers of strategic flexibility, for achieving business excellence. Estimates of the potential performances are shown to assist the learning process at business level, and as evidenced by a within-case analysis also at operations level.