Driving innovation in small accommodation businesses : a comparative study of Zimbabwe and South Africa

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which certain selected factors serve as drivers of innovation in small accommodation businesses (SABs) in two developing economies in Southern Africa namely South Africa and Zimbabwe with the ultimate aim of assisting policy makers and support agencies in formulating innovation oriented strategies for the sector. Two samples were randomly selected from SABs in Zimbabwe and South Africa- two neighbouring Southern African countries. Parametric tests which include t-tests and one-way ANOVAs as well as Bonferonni tests as post-hoc measures were used to test whether SAB propensity to engage in different dimensions of innovation differs by gender; firm size, owner-managers’ years of experience and level of education respectively. Pearson Product Moment Correlations were employed to assess the relationships between market orientation, learning orientation and innovation while Chi-square tests were performed to establish the inter-relationships between independent demographic variables, namely age, gender, education and work experience. In order to investigate whether there are any significant interaction effects between the age of the respondents and their experience in the accommodation sector on each of the five innovation measures, a series of two-way ANOVA tests were performed. Lastly, regression analysis was used to determine the relative efficacy of market orientation (MO), learning orientation (LO) and country in predicting innovation in a business. The results demonstrate that unlike firm size, gender and level of education, which have no association with innovation, there is a strong association between market orientation, learning orientation, owner/managers age and experience and innovation in the two countries. This positive association implies that SABs that are committed to, listen attentively to and learn proactively about their customers’ needs and expectations are better inclined to engage in all the different dimensions of innovation (product/service, process, marketing and organisational) than their counterparts who do not engage in these activities. Among other drivers of innovation, market orientation emerged as the main predictor implying that SABs that invest more in marketing tend to be better innovators than those that invest in learning irrespective of their country of operation. The study also revealed that younger owner/managers of SABs tend to be more innovative than their older, experienced counterparts. The study makes an important contribution to literature on the drivers of innovation in small accommodation businesses in developing economies by dispelling firm size, gender and level of education which were regarded as drivers of innovation across industries previously. Practice and policy wise, the study led to the development of a conceptual framework for investigating how best to drive innovation in local SABs in order to make them more competitive, survive and grow in the face of competition from large accommodation businesses that often happen to be multinational.