Defining obstacles & opportunities for innovation in the Canadian retail sector
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines how retailers approach innovation and strategic decision making. While there is vast prior research about innovation across different sectors, until recently, the perspective of retailers was under-represented in the literature. Where it does exist, the focus has typically been on product manufacturing or process improvements through technology or partnering with their vendor community, rather than an exploration of how retailers think about and develop innovation strategy internally. In some cases, prior research has identified what retail executives say about innovation. However, their words appear at times to be inconsistent with their actions, perhaps due to the wide spectrum of how each interprets the meaning of innovation. Thus, interviews were conducted with 14 experts who offer considerable experience and a broad perspective on the Canadian retail industry as consultants and partners. The purpose of this inductive, qualitative study was to identify what potential industry-specific and internal obstacles to innovation retailers may wish to consider in the future. Results have led to seven emergent themes classified as “legacy issues”, “daily business”, “risk avoidance”, leadership”, “sharing culture”, “unseen technology” and “customer focus”. The barriers or obstacles noted within each theme suggest several potential opportunities for retailers to encourage a more innovative mindset within their organization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".