Abstract
M.Phil. (Engineering Management)
South Africa is currently faced with many social and the economic challenges. Innovation is commonly cited as the solution to these challenges. To improve the economy and quality of life in South Africa, South African organisations need to build innovation capability to be able to compete in the global market. The purpose of this study is to compare the collaboration characteristics of the innovative and non-innovative organisations with the effort of finding a solution on how South African organisations can build innovation capabilities in their organisations. The policymakers, practitioners and scholars that need to implement interventions to the challenges of building innovation capability at the organisational level will find this study useful. This study provides the needed evidence on the relationship between innovation capability and the three characteristics of inter-organisational collaboration. A total of 16 cases were selected and partitioned into two groups, where one group represented the innovative organisations and the other group represented non-innovative organisations. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) 2016 report of the 50 most innovative companies in the world was used to identify the innovative organisations. Three measuring instruments were used for this research and were set up to compare the alliance portfolio size, alliance portfolio diversity and alliance management capability of innovative and non-innovative organisations. An independent sample t-test was selected as a statistical technique to analyze the data. The findings show that there is sufficient evidence to support that innovative organisation has both high alliance portfolio size and high level of portfolio diversity. However, there was no sufficient evidence to support that innovative organisations have a high level of alliance management capability.