ABSTRACT
Innovation in a company’s products, in addition to product introduction, has been the main factor to differentiate product from competitors’ offerings, and has played an important role in marketing, whilst it is considered as the main selling factor. The main objective of the study is to examine the impact of innovation on sales of pharmaceutical products at Kinapharma Ghana Limited. The population for the study consisted of 400 staff members of Kinapharma Ghana Ltd. Two hundred (200) of the members were picked through the purposive sampling technique to represent the sample size. Questionnaire was the main data collection instrument used and the data gathered were analyzed quantitatively through mean, standard deviations and multiple regression analysis where results were presented in the form of tables. Key findings from the study include the following; the product innovation strategies used by Kinapharma Ghana Ltd. were found to include: entering a new market, creating customer value, increasing profitability and increasing market share through innovation. On the impact of innovation on sales at Kinapharma Ghana Ltd., the results showed that product, organizational and marketing innovation were positively related to sales at Kinapharma Ghana Ltd. But process innovation was found to be negatively associated to sales in this company. This indicates that there is a perfect linear relationship between overall organizational innovation and sales at Kinapharma Ghana Ltd. Also, the study revealed that some of the major challenges of innovation at Kinapharma Ghana Ltd. were that: more production methods have to be tried, innovation involves a lot of expensive researches, the pharmaceutical industry is too dynamic and the pharmaceutical industry is too complex. The study recommends that in order to help create and manage higher customer value, Kinapharma Ghana Ltd. and other pharmaceutical companies need to pay considerable attention to customers by creating a system of continuous assessment and evaluation of customer satisfaction as well as proper accountability to customer complaints. Also, employees in the pharmaceutical firms should be encouraged to keep looking anew at the way they approach innovation. Employees must be motivated to think creatively to spring up wonderful ideas that are worth implementing to bring success.
