Satu Aaltonen

Barriers to Employee-Driven Innovation: A Study of a Regional Medium-Sized Bakery

Innovativeness and employee-driven innovations in particular are important sources of competitiveness for small and medium-sized food companies. The fierce competition in the food industry is forcing these companies to increase their operational efficiency in order to compete with the large companies in the market. This paper investigates barriers to innovations in the bakery sector through a case study of a growth-oriented regional bakery. The study contributes to new contextualized knowledge of employee-driven innovation activity in small food production companies. It provides a nuanced understanding of how the manufacturing context of a bakery leads to specific constraints on innovative employee behaviour, and of how the context and the human, organizational and physical resources interact with employee-driven innovation activity.

The Case Story of Inga, an Estonian Craft Shop Owner in Finland

This chapter reveals the essential roles of trust and bridging social capital in an immigrant business start-up process, which takes place in an environment lacking business opportunities based on serving one’s own ethnic community. The narrative unveils how the business start-up process of Inga—an Estonian in Finland—is intertwined with the personal and professional processes of her social inclusion in a new host country. There were several liabilities to overcome during the business start-up process, despite the cultural proximity of her home and host countries. Her story reveals a little-studied phenomenon of the Nordic diaspora.

Enterprise cultural heritage : The source for sustainable competitive advantage and survival for food sector SMEs

Remaining in business and growing is a challenge for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the food sector. The focus of this paper is the internal innovation avenue for SMEs that have been trading for decades and have developed the asset of enterprise cultural heritage (ECH). The authors examine ECH as a source of sustainable competitive advantage, using the value, rarity, imitability and organization (VRIO) framework and evaluating the practical potential of ECH to create sustainable competitive advantage through case studies of two international companies. The authors argue that companies that are only partially able to fulfil each of the VRIO criteria can still claim sustainable competitive advantage, as demonstrated by the case studies. Moreover, it is suggested that ECH is one of the key areas for innovation from within a firm and should be used in developing sustainable competitive advantage.