Innovation Barriers within Autonomous Vehicle Technology : From an Employees Perspective

The world around us is changing, and companies are being pressured to meet customers’ new demands. One such industry feeling more pressure than ever before, is the automotive industry. The automotive industry is dealing with the change towards electrification, biofuels, and perhaps the most radical change of all, self-driving technology. The barriers that organizations face when going from incremental technological improvements to radical technology, is a research area that is largely unexplored. This thesis aims to assess and understand the internal innovation barriers the employees are experiencing when developing new and radical technologies and provide managerial recommendations to overcome these barriers. An empirical case study was carried out to identify the innovation barriers by collecting data through twelve interviews within an autonomous vehicle division at a larger vehicle manufacturer. The findings address three themes as innovation barriers for organizations that historically have not needed to deal with a high degree of new and radical technology development. These themes were broken down into six different barriers, flexibility barrier; planning barrier; collaboration barrier, communication and coordination barrier; partnerships barrier and lastly self-harm barrier. The barrier shows the difficulties that arise when an organization or part of an organization undergoes a process of change to deal with radical technological innovation. These barriers shed light on the challenges of adapting an organization to deal with radical innovation, as is the case with the development of autonomous vehicles