Innovation Risk and Sustainable Competitive Advantages: Empirical Assessment of Government-Linked Companies in Malaysia

This study attempts to assess the present level of innovation status among Malaysian Government-Linked Companies (GLCs). A set of questionnaire was distributed among 134 managers and executives from these GLCs to collect the primary data for this study. The perspectives of executives were collected based on ten factors of innovation practices utilizing the five-point Likert scales. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the data while the reliability and validity were tested using the Cronbach’s alpha test and the Skewness and Kurtosis test, respectively. Factor analysis was used to test the data consistency. The findings revealed the 82.8% of the respondents were agreeable to their firms’ emphasis on the factors of innovation. However, it was found that GLCs that were owned by the federal government placed more focus on innovation compared to the GLCs that were state-owned. This study reveals that overall the Malaysian GLCs should enhance their innovation practices by placing more focus on being engaged in the adoption of innovative designs at work, the reengineering of business processes, innovative pricing, market distribution and promotional methods, enhancing customer satisfaction by importing innovative warranty and maintenance systems, as well as by importing innovative claim clearing processes and methods, and the adoption of innovative order management and follow-up systems.