The main purpose of this study is to establish the effects of strategic innovation on organizational performance in 30 organizations selected from various sectors in Uganda. Inevitably, the following specific research objectives were formulated to guide the study: to validate empirically a proposed framework illustrating organizational performance implications of strategic innovation; to determine the relationship between strategic innovation and organizational performance; to determine the relationship between innovation strategies and organizational performance; and to explore the challenges facing the selected organizations in using strategic innovation to promote organizational performance.
This study largely adopted a positivist research paradigm complimented by postpositivist research paradigm to guarantee reliability, validity and credibility of the findings. Accordingly, the study adopted mixed-methods research approach because of its complementary role to clarify and enhance results from one approach to another. While the sample was selected using stratified and purposive sampling techniques from various sectors of the Ugandan economy, data collection was conducted in Central Business District (CBD) and Wakiso district covering both corporate organizations and top SMEs. The researcher used 300 questionnaires and 15 interview guides to collect data thus achieving 81.3% and 53.3% on response rate respectively. Accordingly, descriptive statistics, correlation and regression analysis were used to establish the relationships between variables and effect of Stategic innovation on organizational performance. Conversely, deductive and interpretive data analyses techniques were applied to analyze qualitative data.
In reality, the following key outputs were established: while the relationship between strategic innovation and organizational performance was very significant; both correlation and regression analyses revealed that all the tenets of strategic innovation studied are positively related to and equally affected organizational performance positively. Moreover, incremental
strategic innovation registered the highest effect on organizational performance as compared to strategic innovation and disruptive strategic innovation.
While all the three key predicator varaibles are positively related to organizational performace, incremental strategic innovation is the highest influencer of organizational performance as followed by strategic innovation and disruptive strategic innovation respectively. Accordingly, the study outcomes indicate that strategic innovation is a strong predictor of organizational performance.