Textile and Apparel Industries
Authors: Deepika Raj (University of Missouri-Columbia) , Jung Ha-Brookshire (University of Missouri-Columbia)
The market size of the Wearable Technology (WT) industry will grow to over U.S. $100 billion by 2023 (Hayward et al., 2016). Despite this increase, the experts have pointed out that fashion companies are lagging in innovation in the WT domain. Researchers argue that, for successful product development (PD), WT teams must have transformational leadership (TL), which is found to be a key factor for a team's innovative work behavior (IWB), which has three step, idea generation (IG), idea promotion (IP), and idea realization (IR). This study is one of the first attempts to investigate different levels of team's TL and IWB between WT and fashion PD teams. The result identifies certain team behavior traits conducive for innovation, which fashion PD teams could utilize if they would like to compete against WT teams. The results also inform the mangers of WT and academicians who trains their workforce of the importance of skills required for IWB and TL.
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How to Cite: Raj, D. & Ha-Brookshire, J. (2017) “Differences in Innovation Approaches between the Product Developers of Wearable Technology and Fashion Industries”, International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings. 74(1).