The Association between Structural Organization Characteristics and Innovation in the Context of the UAE Service Sector: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

Today's intense competition under the global economic framework requires organizations in all sectors regardless of their ownership type or size to innovate. This competition justifies the increasing interest in the literature concerning investigating different issues of innovation. Little attention, however, has been given to the possible linkage between structural organization characteristics and innovation in the services sector. Enriching the literature, this paper investigates this issue in the context of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) service sector. Data required for this study were collected from 85 organizations offering different types of services. The results showed than more than 86% of these organizations can be classified as innovative because they introduced either new or considerably improved services and or new or considerably improved processes during the past three years. Moreover, the organization size advantage that has been found for the manufacturing sector in past research also exists for the UAE service sector. However, unlike most of the relevant studies, no association was found between ownership type and innovation. The results of this study could be of value to services organizations in the UAE and other countries that have similar environments.