Dubai Port World’s Sustainable Innovation Strategy

Research Proposal

The research topic of the paper is the methods of creating the conditions for sustainable innovation about the leadership imperative. Sustainable leadership has become widespread and discussed leadership style; the best companies in the world engage this approach in transforming the existing business models. The DP World (Dubai Port World), a major company in maritime, engages different techniques and conditions that positively influence innovation. The paper aims to explore these creative conditions provided by leaders of the company that nurture innovation among employees.

Brief Introduction

The advantage of sustainable leadership is that it does not rely on the previous models that do not work anymore. Instead, sustainable leadership focuses on the behaviors and initiatives that can be developed to influence the sustainability of a particular business. Sustainable leadership implies that the responsibility is shared, human and financial resources should not be depleted, and continuous improvement is necessary (Hargreaves & Fink 2012). Communication, creativity, teamwork, learning, and adaptation to change are the factors that leaders take into account. Previously, leadership implied obedience, and punctuality. Today, leadership is about learning and human communication (Hargreaves & Fink 2012). Only with this approach, it is possible to ensure new, creative innovations. Without it, human and financial resources will not be able to provide the needed results.

Since markets are influenced by human behavior, they cannot remain the same. Instead, they evolve and change; if leaders are not ready to adapt to this change, there will be other rivals that will outperform them.

Theory and Hypotheses

In theory, if leadership innovation behaviors and techniques are applied more often, it should also result in their distribution. Thus, the hypothesis is the following: applying innovation leadership behaviors and techniques will institutionalize innovation that fosters and ensures repeatable and sustainable innovation.

Research Question

It is essential to understand whether the discussed behaviors and techniques can sustain innovation. Therefore, the research question is how well leaders perform in the “key innovation behaviors” to sustain creative innovation and drive employee innovation?

Research Methodology

The research methodology will include qualitative research of the leadership behaviors and techniques at the chosen company (DP World). To evaluate them, I plan to distribute questionnaires to leaders and employees of the company to understand what behaviors are the most advantageous and what are the least advantageous. This will be my primary data. After that, the opinions of the leaders and employees will be compared and contrasted. I plan to interview three to four leaders and two to three employees.

The interviews will be via phone or face-to-face interviews. Face-to-face interviews allow gathering data that is more accurate. They are generally more convenient and flexible types of research, although also time-consuming.

The secondary data will include articles that discuss and research innovation leadership, existing recent researches, books, and other credible sources.

Anticipated Challenges

The main challenge of the research is the limited time that will not allow me to gather all types of information that can be valuable for this research. The next anticipated challenge is my ability to gather enough data from the respondents; it is possible that there will not be enough respondents willing to participate. The last challenge is information accessibility. Those who are employed at DP World might not have access to the data I need or might not provide it. Some of this data might be sensitive because it is directly linked to the company’s business strategy.

Reference List

Hargreaves, A & Fink, D 2012, Sustainable leadership, John Wiley & Sons, New York.