Edinburgh Napier University

  The retail industry market environment is very competitive; thus, in order to maintain their competitive advantage retailers are required to continuously come up with innovative offerings and systems. This chapter aims to provide useful insights for the retailers regarding the correlation between market orientation and innovation. The chapter illustrates the differences in start-up and mature companies, and reveals new insights with regard to market orientation and its constituent elements, and its relationship with both incremental and radical innovations. Readers learn that strong competitor orientation, a key ingredient of market orientation, has a positive relationship to incremental innovation for start-up companies, but it is counterproductive for mature companies, where a strong customer orientation is associated with radical innovation. The focus is to understand the dynamics of the entrepreneur versus manager during the transition process as a company grows.