Innovation Management in the Postal Sector: What Are the Internal Factors Influencing Postal Operator’s Innovation Management?

Since the past decades, the postal sector is undergoing profound reform (liberalization). The major motivation for such reform processes was and still is the belief that liberalization and deregulation stimulates, among others, product and process innovations, both of which are important vehicles for productivity and economic growth. Against the background of such reform processes, postal operators need to increase their performance through innovation in order to gain competitive advantage and to ensure profitability and growth. Therefore, postal companies have to adapt their innovation management to the changing environment. Until today, there is little research on the adaption of postal operator’s innovation management. In this paper, we aim to describe the internal factors that influence postal operators’ innovation management. The goals of this article are 1) to illustrate the internal factors that are influencing an organization’s ability to manage innovation and 2) to analyze these factors for the particular setting of the postal industry.