Interactive Menu

Innovation within Fast Food Restaurants

-The role of the local restaurant management

Bachelor’s Thesis within Business Administration Authors: Henrik Antonsson Lukas Engström Vytautas Verbus Tutor: Jonkoping Olga Sasinovskaya [May 2011]

Authors’ Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank their tutor Olga Sasinovskaya for valuable support and feedback. Also, the authors would like to thank all participants in this thesis for their cooperation. Finally, the authors would like to thank everyone who has been a part of this thesis, who provided the authors with support, feedback and encouragement.

i

Bachelor’s Thesis in Business Administration

Title: Authors: [Innovation in Fast Food Restaurants – The role of the local restaurant management] Henrik Antonsson Lukas Engström Vytautas Verbus Tutor: Date: Olga Sasinovskaya [2011-05-23]

Subject terms: Innovation, power, communication, franchise, company-owned, fast food restaurant

Abstract

Background: Innovation is an important aspect of business today. It is important for companies to be innovative in order to stay competitive with their competitors. During the last couple of decades, technology has become more and more common both in our daily life, as well as in businesses. This has lead to an increase in technology implementation, especially within the service industry, where customers now can use self-service technologies in order to receive the service on their own. However, a lack of self-service technologies was discovered within the fast food industry. Since these types of innovations increased the service efficiency and decreased the waitingtime for customers, the authors believed that this would be very interesting for local managers within the fast food industry. Therefore, the authors began to investigate how much power local management has over these types of new innovations. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to explore how local management affects the innovation process,...