By Salieu Bojang
Following up on Gibou Jobe’s opinion dated November 17, 2023, on …” harnessing the power of online marketing…,”
O’Reilly and Tushman (2016) noted that “for organizations to survive in the face of change requires their leaders to do two critical but contradictory things: Exploit existing assets and capabilities and explore new markets and technologies” (p. 53). This is especially true for organizations under exploration, Africa’s online trading market – a wide open gap that awaits. Amazon started its online retail business with a single line of products – books, and while exploiting their capabilities, they explored new markets and technologies.
A contradictory course of action that today gave them Amazon Prime and other unique innovations with improved and new technologies, services, and markets. Africa’s online trading market would want to seek a balance in creating streams, just as Amazon does in an incremental-transformative change approach. In that, starting from a particular country, zone, or region, like the western part of Africa, deals with items such as food, electronics, and other essentials, and then expanding with additional findings would be ideal.
ADKAR’s nature-of-change model would be a helpful adoption for such an “entrepreneurial endeavor.” A framework that will help investigate problems, find solutions, and make aware of problems and solutions to establish the business with a mission and vision alongside its supported goals, objectives, and culture.
The framework will help determine the knowledge, skills, and experience needed to act on the strategies. Which, when acted upon, would require a continuity effect for business sustainability. To make that happen, the leadership of online markets would need to encourage, train, develop, and support employees, as well as create a transparent, equitable, accountable, and responsible climate.
In a nutshell, O’Reilly, and Tushman (2016) advocate that Africa’s online trading market will have to align its “organization’s strategy to its success factors (practices and activities), culture (way of life), human resource (people motivation and competencies), and formal organization (structures, controls, careers, and rewards)” (p. 27) for institutionalized innovation.
Institutional innovation and strengthening are critical for Africa now; the Gambia is no exception.
The entire scholarly article on this will be developed and published at the Gambia Center for Research and Policy Studies site for the African community’s inquiry.
References
Hiatt., J. (2006) ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and Our Community. Prosci Learning Center Publication.
O’Reilly, A. C., & Tushman, L., M. (2016). Lead and Disrupt: How to solve the innovator’s dilemma. Stanford University Press.
