Opportunity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Introduction

The selection of the particular Small and Medium Business Enterprise (SME), Orion Electrotech Ltd, has been undertaken for the purpose of completion of the corresponding study report. The current headquarter of the company is situated at Reading RG6 4UT, Cutbush Park Industrial Estate 4, Danehill, Earley. The SME primarily focuses on the recruitment and provisioning of contractual and permanent working personnel to the multiplicity of industrial sectors including the technology management, construction, manufacturing, extraction of natural gas and petroleum, aviation and heavy engineering disciplines.

Megatrend

According to Mian, Lamine and Fayolle (2016), the megatrend has been the emphasis on the talent factors of potential recruits in the core business industries, such as, engineering, technology, petroleum extraction and aviation, necessitates the recruiting consultancies such as OEL, to focus on the development of an effective network, involving both internal and external means, through which identification and subsequent engagement with the potential recruits could be maintained.

Figure 1: Business innovation and opportunity canvas

Opportunities

Stănică et al (2018) have opined that, for the OEL, the restraint from adapting to the trend of VR based opportunities in recruitment and engagement with the potential jobseekers would entail the loss of competitive leverage in comparison to the market competitors. According to Burns (2016), the basis of innovation-based entrepreneurial influence, which could be evidently identified within the Orion Electrotech Ltd, is the effort to meet the expanding expectations of the clientele with the available options. In this context, the prevalent trend of online-based VR assisted hiring, could prove to be the most efficient opportunities for the consultancy to engage with the new applicants and interviewees.

The entrepreneurship

According to Karimi et al (2016), the current practices of recruitment management, within the context of innovation-based entrepreneurial approaches, are related to the process of selection and conversion of candidates through talent relationship management. According to, In this context, the current trends in the recruitment industry, according to Loosemore (2016), are reflective of the growth of significance of accessing and recruiting suitable working personnel through the differential applications which have emerged out of the persistent changes of the digital landscape.

The innovation

According to Squicciarini (2017), the OEL concentrates on the aspects of experience and technical talents within the contacted potential recruits so as to refer them to the significant business industries served by the company in terms of human resource provisioning. This process, according to Scuotto et al (2017), under the influence of the talent relationship management concept, is now subjected to the impact of the emerging recruitment industrial trend of Virtual Reality (VR) based recruitment. Upadhyay and Khandelwal (2018) have highlighted the case of Walmart which had opted to utilize 17000 Oculus Go VR heads-up display sets in training the company employees. This precedence could be capitalized upon by the OEL to utilize such headsets for the purpose of training recruits about the procedures related to their future tasks. Such VR based employee training would ensure that the selected candidates could learn critical new skills which could become beneficial for them during their future employment engagements (Khan, Lacity, and Carmel, 2018).

Threats of substitution

According to Audretsch, Hayter, and Link (2015), Orion Electrotech Ltd (OEL) has been an award-winning consultancy of recruitment which has been operating since the previous 2 decades with offices at Alesbury and Reading and the current employee strength is that of 60 personnel. The organizational effort invested in technology directed recruitment has the potential scope of instituting the changes through which the realization of current trend-based business opportunities could be successfully performed. These contribute to the positive portfolio of the SME. However, the barriers to entry in this industrial discipline of recruitment are considerably low at the UK given the relatively constricted numbers of governance oversights and regulations and the meagre start-up costs which are required. Thus, the threat of substitutions is definitely moderate if not abjectly high, for OEL.

Bargaining power of Suppliers

According to Butt and Zeb (2016), the transactional particulars associated with the recruitment business, such as, searching for the candidates, screening the appropriate ones from the received applications in terms of talent and experience profiles, scheduling interviews and placement and automated information management. The cumulative impact of such exigencies has brought forth the necessity to utilize referral organisations. Thus, according to Cloutman and Jenkins (2019), the prospect of increment in the bargaining powers of suppliers is foremost for OEL since the referral generating institutions and marketing agencies could determine the consistency of the flow of applicants to the recruitment SME.

Bargaining powers of the Byers

The UK recruitment industry is served by multiple recruitment companies and the task is essentially the same. Thus, the bargaining power of the buyers of the services of OEL is considerably high. Thus, the onus remains on the OEL to consistently recruit the best talent and go the extra mile to place them at appropriate job designations.

Threat of New Entry

Upadhyay and Khandelwal (2018) have stated that historically, the UK recruitment industry has been indicative of low barriers for new entrants. Some factors are the minor start-up costs along with the relative laxity of official regulations governing the process of entry. Thus, the threat of new entry is the highest in this industry. Thus, for the OEL, this specifies the necessity of application of particular strategic methods to maintain the market leverage which the SME currently holds. Carruth (2017) has thought that referrals of recruits to the technology and construction as well as manufacturing industries are completely contingent upon the measures of soft skills as well as technical proficiency possessed by such recruits. Concerning such contexts, for the OEL, such necessities could be effectively addressed through the utilization of online-based tools for assessment of the soft skills of identified candidates.

Market rivalry

Consequentially, the outcome of cumulative effect of such low barriers to entry and threat of substituting organisations and services for the OEL has meant that intense competitive rivalry in the current market scenario is omnipresent. This requires the OEL to be an over achiever in terms of business objective management. The negative effect of it is that OEL cannot charge premium remunerations for the premium services from the clientele.

Segmentation

According to Bartakova et al (2017), the company concentrates on sourcing of the blue and white-collar candidates as per the existing demands and the requirement profiles of the clientele with the added service of provisioning of advice, in terms of career support options to the candidates. Thus, the market segmentation is dual fold and is inclusive of personnel within the age group of 20 to 50 years of age.

Targeting

According to Fominykh and Prasolova-Førland (2019), to analyse the comprehensive fitment of the recruited personnel concerning the placement related task criteria, OEL has instituted such programs of assessment of new personnel from the campus of educational institutions. The problem for youngsters to join in technology-intensive industries such as the manufacturing and technology management sectors, could be understood, to be the apprehensions associated with the limited or absolute dearth of any prior knowledge regarding the work procedures and conditions related to working in such sectors. This obstacle restricts primarily the members of the Generation Z, Generation Y and the millennial populace from joining such sectors. VR directed recruitment could furnish a viable solution to such a problem.

Positioning of the SME in the market

According to Ryan and Derous (2019), at the current global scenario, the SMEs, which, utilise talent relationship management based tools of recruitment, have achieved an average of 93% of offer acceptance rate by their clientele regarding the placement of recruited candidates, in comparison to the 89% which is the global market average. The factor of the immersive experience provisioning to the existing candidates and interviewees regarding their potential task jobs, according to van Esch, Black, and Ferolie (2019), is a significant multiplier of the effectiveness of OEL in terms of market positioning of the firm. This highlights the capability of the SME to offer experiential opportunities to the talented and interested personnel belonging to the Generation Y and Generation Z. This is a strong argument in favour of capitalization of the opportunities offered by VR technologies by OEL since the members of both of these above-mentioned generations have been found to possess a greater inclination of preferring immersive multimedia-based experiences in comparison to the two-dimensional experiences offered by printed material and digital videos.

Conclusion

The preceding research report has been deliberative about the identification of a prevalent trend in the UK recruitment industry, in the form of VR based online recruitment and it has delved into the potential of innovative utilisation of the applications related to such a technology in the current context of the selected SME of Orion Electrotech Ltd. The emphasis of the report has been primarily on the exploration of the suitability of such an application in the selected business context.

Reference List

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According to Brewster and Hegewisch (2017), the aspects of entrepreneurship and innovation-based business approaches are indicative of the megatrends which could be identified. The components of such megatrends are as the following:

1: The identification and evaluative assessment of the available business opportunities,

2: The exploitation of identified business opportunities to formulate goods and services for future growth of the respective business enterprises (Liu, Javed and Mcnair, 2016).

3:Realisation of business opportunities in the form of the positioning of the business entities within the specific industries. This contributes to the greater growth and expansion of the organizational business efforts could become definite possibilities.

4:The emphasis is always on the achievement of greater diversity in the product and service portfolio so that greater avenues of reaching the customers could be developed.

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