INNOVATION ENVIRONMENT IN SOFTWARE COMPANIES: A STUDY OF THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PARENT COMPANY AND ITS SPIN-OFFS

Abstract

One of the greatest worries that have involved the organizations, in the last decades, is the need to create alternatives to maintain its competitivity and its growing in a dynamic environment. The competitivity of organizations depends, mostly, on its ability to adjust to changes in the context it is inserted in. In this scenery, the innovation prints a vital step to organizations, as their survival depends on it. In the field of information technology, where technology is in evident change every second, this reality is even more urgent. Faced up to this view, the main purpose of this research is to verify which characteristics are present in the environment of innovation in the software organizations in Blumenau-SC according to the 29- dimension MIRP methodology. As the intentional sample we selected the first information technology company and three of its spin offs. The research has been divided into two phases. Initially, we have identified the innovations by means of a qualitative and exploratory study, through a semi-structured interview, that has enabled the construction of the company’s time line. Next, in a descriptive and quantitative research, we have collected the answers of an applied questionnaire of 59 closed questions based on a MIS standard developed by MIRP and analyzed the data using the LHSTAT© software. From the last one we used the factorial confirmatory analysis. Following that, we compared the mother-organization’s spin offs to the other ones, through Scheffé’s test, in order to identify the differences and similarities between those. The relevance dimension level for each company has been measured through the main component analysis and confirmed through Euclidian distance application. The results of this research show that the characteristics of the innovating environment are in the mother-organization and some of them are repeated in the spin offs. These spin offs are similar to the mother-organization’s ones in seventeen dimensions and differ from them in nine dimensions.