Learning is a crucial process for sustainable innovation. And even though not each and every one innovation is successful, all the innovation activities represent an opportunity to learn (Cohen, M and Levinthal 1990). There are different tools available to companies to do this, benchmarking being one of them. It uses comparisons within, as well as outside of the organization, in order to provide a motivation to do better (Tidd and Bessant, 2009). Benchmarking is a center of learning and innovation in Whole Foods. First of all there is the learning from competition – learning from a firm within a sector. According to R. Ander (2015) “Successful innovation means tracking your partners and potential adopters as closely as you track your own development …show more content…
Additionally, they are both regular visitors of the competitors’ food stores. “I probably spend more time in K-mart than the CEO of K-mart himself,” admitted Mr. Mackey (Inc.com, 2013). Secondly, there is benchmarking within the organization. The internally established competition and peer review system represent a significant driver of innovation in the company. One such elaborate system is The "Store Tour" where employees and leaders periodically visit each other’s stores in order to conduct performance audit and structured feedback. This interconnection between different areas and teams provides a great environment for comparing, adapting as well as rethinking and unlearning strategies and give rise to a culture of incremental progress (Fast Company, 1996). Lastly, there is leaning from a different firm that also operates within a different sector, which can be very challenging but it can also bring completely new perspective and eventually lead to a disruptive innovation. The above mentioned brand platform created by Whole Foods through the system of low-interest loans to its suppliers has a great potential to generate many innovations in the company; and perhaps eventually reshape the food retailing as we know …show more content…
4. Recommendations After examining the business management at Whole Foods it is obvious that innovation is a core element here which makes the company one of a kind in the world of food retail business. From the analysis, as well as the values obtained from the innovation auditing tool, it is evident that the overall strategy and organization make Whole Foods a truly innovative company. While innovation has been observed in other areas as well, one can believe there are some potential risks arising from the management strategy and there is a space from improvement. When employees lack freedom, they usually don’t demonstrate creativity or show initiative for improvement. However too much freedom people or teams may cause switch focus to the individual directions instead of the whole organization (Tidd and Bessant, 2009). A good example of this “misdirection” was is the case of the Store Tours. While these were supposed to serve as a motivation to represent the store and to share innovative ideas, they very often ended up being rather “show-offs” wasting both time and resources of the