So I thought today I'd do a case study blog about a company I know really well- Fun Farm ltd. Anyone from outside of the Lincolnshire area would not have heard of them, basically it's a childrens play centre with slides, ball pits and a restaurant, the English equivalent of 'Chuck-y Cheese'. It also happens to be where I work; I am the duty manager of the Grantham branch and so know a lot about the companies innovation, both successful and non-successful.
Whilst not exactly a multi-national company, it has 3 large premises spanning across Grantham, Sleaford and Lincoln and has undergone a lot of innovative changes recently!
Firstly, when the recession hit, it hit our company really hard. People had less disposable income and so had to cut out luxuries such as days out in favour of essentials, resulting in us being £10,000 down from the previous year. Staff motivation was low as they were talks about closing and due to making a few members redudant, we all took on extra responsibilites in order to survive as a business. Unlike any other business, the recession hit us hard. However, we were fortunate to survive the recession, not by chance but by implimenting a number of innovative strategies.
Firstly, as mentioned above the management had to cut back on staff members. The main issue here was that every staff member has a varying degree of both tacit and explicit knowledge.
Image from- cognativedesignsolutions [online] accessed 18/1/12
As the diagram above shows, knowledge management is difficult because only 5% of an employees knowledge is physical items such as certificates, records etc (explicit). The rest is made up of 'tacit' knowledge, a psychological concept which we can not prove, only obvserve. We had members of staff who were very "skilled" in terms of their explicit knowledge, they were very smart no questioning that; but they were lacking in 'implicit' knowledge; being book smart does not mean you will be competant to work with customers, these are skills which you learn through doing now by reading (very much a Robert Baden-Powell type approach to thinking). Weighing up the opportunity costs of losing a staff member is always difficult and in some instances we were lucky enough to have a large number of staff members who had a good knowledge of the company and so only had to make redundant 3 employees. The knock on effect of this was that it lead to the current work force working harder; no doubt because they were scared of losing their job too.
Another issue we faced was that during week-days we were always quite, it was costing more money to stay open then we were taking in. The manager was aware of a number of parents who held creshes at their house during the weektime and this lead to an innovative idea. She created a facebook page and added all the local businesses and regular customers to it to build up our clientelle database. We then introduced an offer that had been running in the other fun farms, a discounted entry fee before 1pm in order to attract as many customers in as early as possible. The logic behind this was that if people turned up early, they would stay until at least lunch time and buy their food from our premises, however this plan backfired as many people simply left when they were hungry instead of buying from us. One thing we did learn though from this was that customers would have stayed longer if our food prices were cheaper, and so we looked into what our choices were in terms of supplier.
From doing this, we saw that we could actually save money by changed supplier, and by removing some items from our menu, we spent less on our food bills, meaning we were able to offer meal deals which were instantly popular. Through the process of finding out what our clinets wanted and implimenting it, you can argue that our company was innovative throughout the recession. Carol (1985) and Baron (1983) both agree that 'originality' is one of the key cognative factors effecting innovation and that was exactly what our idea was; it was original and thanks to this original innovative strategy our business has managed to survive the recession.
Reference list:
Baron, S "How effective are we at managing innovation?" (1983:2), published by: Ebsco publishing
Carol, S "Perspectives of innovation within organisations" (1985:4), published by :Ebsco publishing
Fun farm [online], found at : www.funfarm.co.uk, accessed 19/1/12
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