Innovation for Emerging Markets Confronting Institutional Environment Challenges: Perspectives from Visionary Leadership and Institutional Entrepreneurship
Emerging markets are considered to be the largest untapped markets on earth with substantial business opportunities. However, emerging markets are characterised by weak institutional context. For entrepreneurs, how to achieve innovations in emerging markets confronting the challenge of institutional environment remains largely unexplored in the literature. This research study adopted a qualitative method using case study approach. Ten (10) top level and middle level managers were sampled, contacted and interviewed from an emerging market firm (EMF). Data was analysed using qualitative content analysis. Focusing on the product innovation for India’s masses with the creation of indigenous digital telecom switches by Centre for development of Telematics (C-DoT), our analysis reveal that entrepreneurs with visionary leadership can envision emerging market prospective and thereby have greater possibility of acting as institutional entrepreneurs to avoid uncertainty for emerging market innovations. Our proposed conceptual framework can be secured as a reference point by potential entrepreneurs to innovate targeting the emerging markets, and the study also contributes significantly to the theoretical literature on emerging market innovation formulating a set of propositions to advance research in this subject.