Crafting the forever now: Corporate heritage brand innovation at John Lewis Partnership

• Author: Weifeng Chen,John M. T. Balmer,David Botchie,Judy Faraday,Ammar Sammour
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jsc.2315
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Date: 01 January 2020

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Crafting the forever now: Corporate heritage brand innovation

at John Lewis Partnership

Ammar Sammour

1

| Weifeng Chen

2

| John M. T. Balmer

2

| David Botchie

2

|

Judy Faraday

3

1

Coventry University—Business School,

Coventry, United Kingdom

2

Brunel Business School, London, United

Kingdom

3

John Lewis Heritage Centre, Cookham,

United Kingdom

Correspondence

Ammar Sammour, Business School, Coventry

University, Jaguar Building, Priory Street,

Coventry CV1 5FB, United Kingdom.

Email: ammar.sammour@coventry.ac.uk

Abstract

Being innovative and adaptive to changing business environment fosters and sustains

the success of corporations with heritage. Our article addresses the insights of the

innovation strategy of John Lewis Partnership (JLP) as a corporate heritage brand

and reveals that strategic innovation the key strand of JLP's brand heritage, which

has contributed to the continuous success of JLP for over a century. Developed from

the S-curve innovation theory, we have developed a corporate heritage brand inno-

vation process framework with four stages: invention, sustainability, expansion, and

extension. Our research confirms that S-curve innovation theory can be applied to

scrutinize organizational innovation of corporations with heritage brand.

1|INTRODUCTION

Research on innovation can be interdisciplinary as the innovation

phenomenon can be studied from social, technological, or organiza-

tional perspectives. In this study, we focus on the innovation trait

of the corporate heritage brand through the lens of organizational

innovation. An innovation can be the adoption of a new product or

service, a new production process technology, a new structure or

administrative system, or a new plan or program pertaining to the

adopting corporation and organizational members (Daft, 1982;

Damanpour, 1991; Damanpour & Evan, 1984; Zaltman, Duncan, &

Holbek, 1973). This definition is sufficiently broad to include different

types of innovations pertaining to all parts of organizations and all

aspects of their operation.

The adoption of innovation is generally intended to contribute to

the performance or effectiveness of the adopting corporation. Innova-

tion is a means of changing an organization, whether as a response to

changes in its internal or external environment or as a pre-emptive

action taken to influence an environment. Even the most stable envi-

ronments change (Appiah & Sarpong, 2015; Hage, 1980), organiza-

tions adopt innovations continually over time. Hence, organizational

innovativeness is more accurately represented when multiple rather

than single innovations are considered (Damanpour, 1991).

Corporations with heritage brands are normally successful due

to their embedded continuous innovative tradition. To reflect the

continuity of innovation adoption over time for these corporations,

we have identified and revealed the applicability of S-curve innova-

tion theory to explain this phenomenon based on our John Lewis

Partnership case study.

2|S-CURVE THEORY AND

ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATION

In the innovation literature, prior research suggests that innovation

normally evolves through an initial period of slow growth, followed by

one period of fast growth, and culminates in a plateau in terms of per-

formance. When connived against time, the performance resembles

an S-curve. Support for this phenomenon comes primarily from the

work of Foster (1986), Sahal (1981), and J. Utterback (1994a). Sood

and Tellis (2005) who name this phenomenon the innovation life cycle

because it explains the occurrences of three major stages of the

S-curve: introduction, growth, and maturity (see Abernathy & Utterback,

1978; J. Utterback, 1994a) from the marketing perspective.

Introduction stage. A new adoption of innovation makes slow pro-

gress in performance during the early phase of its product life cycle

because the innovation is novel to the market, and certain basic but

important bottlenecks must be overcome before the newly adopted

innovation can be translated into practical and meaningful improve-

ments in performance.

DOI: 10.1002/jsc.2315

Strategic Change. 2020;29:115–126. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jsc © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 115