Assignment title: Information
Topic Research methods – critical evaluation
Read the following document and In 250 words provide constructive criticism to this methodology ad suggest additional approaches to consider.
Innovation and changes have been sources of sustainable development inside the globalized world today, while every companies are now gathering all kind of resources in order to initiate new ideas for their own practices or new products. The studies of the impact of innovation and changes are crucial for a deeper understanding of how and why they are important of businesses these day, especially retail industry which is suffering from uncertainties of the environment. It is simply that a retail business would sell a product or service inside a global market where everyone free to do the same and copy it in various way, thus the innovation could help the business to appeal to customers’ need that stand up against all type of competition. Pangburn (2010) suggested that the innovation comes because the world’s market is not the same anymore due to the recession, changes in consumer behavior, e-commerce and globalization have shifted retail industry into a new era where no one could predict of what is happening next. Creativity is just and ideas, but with innovation as well as all the changes could make that ideas become big and profitable. There are many studies have conducted by various academics to learn about those factors that would change the business direction by shifting the company perspective into a more innovative mode and commit to make the transition. One research paper studied by Caniato et al. (2014) illustrated the important of innovation and the change of supply chain management inside luxury retail, because a successful product innovation require an effective supply chain management strategy that could shape the whole procedure into a more efficient and practical way to achieve the objective. The researchers have used a case based methodology to describe and explore new phenomena or to build new operations management theories, which they have selected a luxury Italian retailer company to understand the natural complexity of the business as that Italian company was facing a great loss then it had changed its organizational structure as well as introduce new innovations to the market. Data collections and analysis are also conducted by interviewing 13 high level employees of the company to source useful information, so the researchers could obtain the data of supply chains as well as their roles inside the significant change process. Another similar research from Patano et al. (2017) outlined areas that retailers are now focus in changing or innovate further include shopping experience, payment system, info/product display system, information product system, product technology ...etc, while the studies found that innovation in technologies would enchant the shopping experience of consumes. They have conducted various research through Patent analysis using text mining and bibliometric data to learn on how many patents have granted for companies into account, historical data is also collected as part of the analysis too. Customers are now saving more, spending less, and trading down, by looking into shopping online, mobile app and looking for online commercial campaign rather than going to buy at shopping mall (Balasescu, 2013).
All these studies have shown that the research topic related to innovation and change have been conducted by many academics and researchers before using numbers of effective methodology that could be useful of the future research. Case based methodology by selecting retailers who had gone through the transition of innovation period and Primary data collections (Interview, survey & observation) are among the effective methods to conduct the research of “How innovation and change is having a significant role in retail business?” Apart from these there are several more important methods to be used, for instance the combination of qualitative and quantitative data analysis are perfect to illustrate the numbers and how the trend of the market would experience from the innovation as well as new practices. Secondary data collections could be useful sources for the research as a guideline based on those previous research from various academics that related with the topic of innovation and change inside retail industry.