Investigating the effects of the "VUCA" factors on product innovation performance at turkish bus & coach industry

With the expansion of globalization, digitalization, and rapid technological developments over the world, businesses have been challenging with fluctuated markets, unpredicted issues, launching more complex products & services to attract customer preferences, and the inability to maintain the decision-making process combined with lacking information at several industries. The VUCA concept as an acronym was coined by United States Army War College (USAWC) to describe a chaotic environment, including volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity factors. After the global financial crisis in 2008, the VUCA concept has regained importance through management and leadership perspectives. Employees are one of the critical components for companies to sustain business progress in less adverse effects during the age of disruptive innovation. Within these perspectives, each VUCA factor was analyzed through the scales based on perception, and the researcher aimed to investigate possible relationships among VUCA factors. Additionally, the relationship between Product Innovation Performance (PIP) and each of the VUCA factors were examined to illustrate the effects. As a result of detailed observations and analysis, each VUCA factor had a significant relationship between them and categorized in two distinctive but interrelated dimensions under the circumstances of the Turkish bus & coach industry. Although there is a relationship between VUCA's volatility, uncertainty, complexity factors, and the product innovation performance of the Turkish bus & coach industry, it is observed that especially ambiguity (r = .346) factor has a high impact on the product innovation performance at Turkish bus & coach industry. The Covid-19 pandemic, international conflicts, terror attacks, economic instabilities, climate change in which humanity has been experiencing nowadays demonstrate that the existence of the VUCA concept may be in the future and can be accepted as the "new normal" occurring in unpredicted intervals of time