Innovation process management in global fashion businesses : a review of contextual aspects

This first paper discusses and explains the extant studies on the management of innovation for global fashion and textile businesses. The discussion is deliberately broad, encompassing research on innovations from a number of academic disciplines including marketing, engineering design, technological management, information management and organization science. The purpose is to establish an understanding of the contextual aspects that fundamentally pervade the volatile global innovation activities of today. At the start, we observe the global fashion and textile businesses and attempt to make generalizations about global fashion and textile innovation process using a process-chain perspective. To explore the essence for the sustenance of competitive innovation, we review the competing innovation management paradigms in the fields of organization behavioural science, information processing and systems thinking. On these premises, we conclude with the target of better innovation process performance and more effective and intelligent methods to attain such performance. This paper continues with a discussion of two major approaches to the improvement and development of processes: (i) socio-technical systems and (ii) soft systems. These form the basis for the methodology used in this investigation. Following this, a taxonomy summary diagram is established to illustrate the range of sources in the literature on managing innovation processes in the global context. The paper concludes with a discussion of current developments and on the implications of managing innovation activities in globally dispersed businesses.