What hampers innovation? Revealed barriers versus deterring barriers

Innovating firms are likely to face several challenges and experience different types of barriers. In this paper we argue that it is necessary to distinguish between two kinds of barriers to innovation. The first corresponds to what we describe as revealed barriers and reflects the degree of difficulty of the innovation process and the learning experience consequent on the firm engaging in innovation activity. The second type of impediment, which we label deterring barriers, encompasses the obstacles that prevent firms from committing to innovation. We use data from the 4th UK Community Innovation Survey (CIS4) to investigate the relationship between firms’ engagement in innovation and their assessment of the barriers to innovation. We show that the relationship is curvilinear in the case of costs and market barriers. These results have important implications for innovation policy and innovation management.     

An audit of technological innovation capabilities in chinese firms: some empirical findings in Beijing, China

Recent studies have advocated different technological innovation capabilities (TICs) and discussed their impact on a firm’s competitive performance. This paper introduces a study framework of innovation audit and examines the relevance of seven TICs to building and sustaining the competitiveness of Chinese firms. Empirical data was acquired through a recent study of 213 Chinese firms in Beijing, China. Regression analysis was employed to examine the correlation between TICs and innovation rate, sales growth, and product competitiveness among these firms. The findings verify that R&D and resources allocation capabilities are the two most important TICs. A strong R&D capability could safeguard innovation rate and product competitiveness in large and medium-sized firms, whereas a resources allocation capability would enhance the sales growth in small firms. However, the impact of learning and organising capabilities on a firm’s innovation performance has yet to be investigated.The findings of this paper suggest that Chinese firms should consider a more balanced focus on their TICs’ harmonising enhancement. In order to maintain their sustainable development, effectively plan and implement their innovation strategies as well as enhance their whole innovation capability, Chinese firms should closely relate their TICs to the formulation of technology strategy and harmonisation of innovation and R&D activities.     

The innovative behaviour of tourism firms—Comparative studies of Denmark and Spain

Tourism firms operate in a competitive sector where innovating is often a condition for survival. This article presents a theoretical framework for understanding tourist firms’ innovative behaviour and innovation systems in tourism. The innovativeness of tourism firms and its determinants are investigated by analysing quantitative as well as qualitative data comparing Spain and Denmark. A taxonomy of tourism firms is suggested and the firms’ characteristics which influence their innovativeness are presented. Additionally, the role of innovation networks is discussed, as is the role of innovation systems. The article suggests that large size, professionalism, but also entrepreneurship among small tourism firms are important determinants of innovation. Varied innovation networks are another determinant as are supportive innovation systems. These determinants favour Spanish firms, which are more innovative than Danish ones. In the final section, policy recommendations are presented.     

A man on the inside: Unlocking communities as complementary assets

Since Teece's seminal paper explaining who were the gainers from technological innovation, increased globalization and the information and communication technology revolution have brought new ways for firms to organize and appropriate from innovation. A new more open model of innovation suggests that firms can benefit from sources of innovation that stem from outside the firm. The central theme of this paper is how firms try to unlock communities as complementary assets. These communities exist outside firm boundaries beyond ownership or hierarchical control. Because of practices developed by communities to protect their work, firms need to assign individuals to work in these communities in order to gain access to developments and, to an extent, influence the direction of the community. Using network analysis we show that some software firms sponsor individuals to act strategically within a free and open source software (FOSS) community. Firm sponsored individuals interact with more individuals than interact with them, and also they seek to interact with central individuals in the community. However, we can see differences in how individuals interact, depending on whether their affiliation is with a dedicated FOSS firm or an incumbent in the software industry. Apparently, some firm managers believe they need ‘a man on the inside’ to be able to gain access to communities.     

From knowledge to added value: A comparative, panel-data analysis of the innovation value chain in Irish and Swiss manufacturing firms

The innovation value chain (IVC) divides the innovation process into three separate links or activities: knowledge gathering, knowledge transformation and knowledge exploitation. Here, we report a comparative panel data analysis of the IVC in Ireland and Switzerland. Both economies are small, very open and depend significantly on innovation to maintain competitive advantage. In recent years, however, R&D and innovation growth in Ireland has been markedly stronger than that in Switzerland. We investigate these differences through the ‘lens’ of the IVC. Significant similarities exist between some aspects of firms’ innovation behaviour in each country: strong complementarities emerge between external knowledge sources and between firms’ internal and external knowledge. And, in both countries, in-house R&D and links to customers prove important drivers of innovation. Innovation drives productivity growth in different ways in the two countries, however, through product change in Switzerland and through process change in Ireland. Other differences in the determinants of innovation performance linked to ownership and firms’ institutional context emphasise the systemic nature of innovation and the legacy of past patterns of industrial development.     

The paradox of openness: Appropriability,external search and collaboration

To innovate, firms often need to draw from, and collaborate with, a large number of actors from outside their organization. At the same time, firms need also to be focused on capturing the returns from their innovative ideas. This gives rise to a paradox of openness—the creation of innovations often requires openness, but the commercialization of innovations requires protection. Based on econometric analysis of data from a UK innovation survey, we find a concave relationship between firms’ breadth of external search and formal collaboration for innovation, and the strength of the firms’ appropriability strategies. We show that this concave relationship is stronger for breadth of formal collaboration than for external search. There is also partial evidence suggesting that the relationship is less pronounced for both external search and formal collaboration if firms do not draw ideas from or collaborate with competitors. We explore the implications of these findings for the literature on open innovation and innovation strategy.     

Ownership and firm innovation in a transition economy: Evidence from China

We examine innovation performance of firms in a transition economy from an ownership perspective. We focus specifically on the relationship between ownership structures and firm innovation performance. Drawing on data from 548 Chinese firms we find volume of patent registration to be most strongly influenced by foreign ownership in the firm along with firm affiliation within a business group. The influence of state and institutional ownership on innovation performance is positive but lagged. Contrary to expectations, insider ownership leads to lower innovation performance and concentrated ownership has no significant impact. Our study has two principal contributions. Firstly, we utilize a comprehensive treatment of ownership characteristics, overcoming weakness in previous studies that have used a more narrow focus on ownership type. Secondly, we contribute to understanding of how firms in transition economies build ‘indigenous’ capabilities for innovation by drawing attention to the interplay of foreign and domestic control of agents’ innovation.     

Innovation,employment growth,and foreign ownership of firms: A European perspective

This paper examines how foreign-owned and domestically owned firms transform innovation into employment growth. The empirical analysis, based on the model of Harrison et al. (2008) and CIS data for 16 countries, reveals important differences between the two groups: Due to general productivity increases and process innovation, foreign-owned firms experience higher job losses than domestically owned firms. At the same time, employment-creating effects of product innovation are larger for foreign-owned firms. Together with employment-stimulating effects stemming from existing products, they overcompensate the negative displacement effects resulting in net employment growth in foreign-owned firms. However, net employment growth turns out to be smaller in foreign-owned firms than in domestically owned firms.     

Comparing firms’ triadic patent applications across countries: Is there a gap in terms of R&D effort or a gap in terms of performances?

This paper addresses the question of national differences as regard the number of triadic patents applied for by inventors from several OECD countries. The key idea is to determine whether such differences should be attributed to differences in R&D expenditures or rather to some other reasons, mainly institutional or behavioural ones. With this aim in view, both a macro-economic analysis, based on aggregate data for triadic patent counts and R&D expenditures and a micro-economic analysis based on firms’ data from three selected sectors are performed. In both cases, the methodological focus is made on the introduction, the definition and the estimation of a national index of relative efficiency in standard count data models. The main empirical findings are that there is a strong heterogeneity in terms of performance among European countries and a strong intra-country heterogeneity among sectors. This suggests that, in the field of innovation policies, there is a need for “tailored” solutions reflecting the specificities of each innovation system. Moreover, we show that European countries over-perform the United States in some high-tech sectors where the leadership of American firms is traditionally alleged, whereas European firms fail to keep up in more traditional sectors.     

The French defence industry in the knowledge management era: A historical overview and evidence from empirical data

In the defence industry the recent development of a ‘market for technology’, the creation of new European high-technology companies as well as transformations in government agencies have driven firms to reposition their technological and organizational skills. Our objective is to show that the transformations that have occurred in the past 10 years have not only redefined skills and the organization of production, but also have given a more strategic place to knowledge management (KM) practices. We provide a contextual and historical overview based on qualitative interviews, in order to better understand the relation between KM and innovative behaviour in this industry. We build an original industrial and technological database comprising various samples that provides quantitative information concerning KM and innovative practices. The results of the statistical analysis reveal the specificity of firms in this industry. Taking account of the size of these firms and their technological intensity, we show that the behaviour of defence industry firms in terms of KM practices, differs from that of other firms. This is evident from their technological performance, and innovation and patenting intensity. This structural tendency is explained as an innovative behaviour in the French national innovation system rather than merely a ‘trend’.     

Distance to the frontier and the perception of innovation barriers across European countries

Barriers to innovation have mainly been studied in a single country context. This paper studies differences in the perception of innovation barriers between innovative and non-innovative firms for 18 EU countries. The countries are grouped by their distance to the technological frontier using Community Innovation Surveys for the years 2002–2004 and 2004–2006. The results show that knowledge barriers related to the availability of skilled labour, innovation partners and technological knowledge are more important for firms located in countries close to the frontier, while the opposite is true regarding the availability of external finance. Moreover, while the share of innovators decreases with the distance to the technological frontier, the share of firms not interested or in no need of innovation increases. This is consistent with the idea that as firms approach the technological frontier, they increasingly need to focus on the creation of own knowledge and the adoption of innovation-based growth strategies to stay competitive.     

Technological regimes and the variety of innovation behaviour: Creating integrated taxonomies of firms and sectors

This paper presents an integrated set of innovation taxonomies for firms and sectors. It discards the practice of representing industries by some average behaviour, instead characterising them by the distribution of diverse innovation modes at the firm level. The theoretical focus is on (i) Schumpeter's distinction between ‘creative’ and ‘adaptive response’, and (ii) differences regarding technological opportunities, appropriability conditions and the cumulativeness of knowledge. Applying statistical cluster analysis, the empirical identification is based on the micro-data of the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) for 22 European countries. The final cluster validation highlights the simultaneous diversity and contingency of firm behaviour with distinct technological regimes exhibiting systematic differences in the distribution of heterogenous firms.     

A tale of two literatures: Transaction costs and property rights in innovation outsourcing

This paper investigates the relative importance of property rights and transactions cost factors in driving the decision of firms to outsource innovation. Using data for over 8000 firms from the UK Community Innovation Survey, we find that property right factors dominate over transaction cost factors. Transaction cost variables are more important for process innovation, while property rights variables are more significant for firms involved in product innovation. In addition, we find that firms involved in process innovation have a higher probability of outsourcing innovation than firms involved in product innovation.     

The economic impact of technological and organizational innovations. A firm-level analysis

By using firm-level data provided by the last round of the (Italian) Community Innovation Survey (CIS4) this paper explores (in a manufacturing-services comparative framework) the relationship between technological and non-technological innovations and their impact on firms’ performances. The empirical evidence presented shows that including the organizational dimension of innovation provides a much more comprehensive picture of the variegated universe of innovation in both macro-sectors. Four distinct innovation modes have been identified on the basis of the ways firms combine technological and non-technological innovations. These different modes of innovation are present and relevant in both manufacturing and service sectors and have been found to have a differentiated impact on firms’ performances. Strategies characterized by the joint introduction of product, process and organizational innovations have been found to give to both manufacturing and service firms a clear competitive advantage vis à vis both non-innovating firms and firms with a narrow approach to innovation. A few significant differences between services and manufacturing firms in the relevance and economic impact of different types of innovation strategies have also been found.     

When publications lead to products: The open science conundrum in new product development

This paper examines interdependencies between firms’ activities in the realms of open science and commercial product development. We present a theoretical framework that outlines when a firm’s involvement in academic communities enhances its innovative performance in terms of new products in development. We argue that the disclosure of more, valuable R&D work in quality scholarly publications and collaborations with academic partners positively affect firm innovation. We further hypothesize a differential effect of adopting open science strategies on the innovation type, being more pronounced for radical innovations than for incremental innovations. We empirically analyze a unique panel dataset containing information on the product innovation performance and R&D activities of 160 UK therapeutic biotechnology firms over the period 1998- 2009. Our results from count data models on the number of new products in development provide empirical support for our hypotheses.     

Co-operative ties and innovation: Some new evidence for UK manufacturing

Drawing upon survey data from 436 firms, this paper explores the impact of co-operative ties upon levels of innovation (both product and process) in five UK manufacturing industries. Unlike a number of previous studies in this area, the data itself captures both the scale and multi-dimensional nature of both co-operation and innovation. The paper finds evidence to support the hypothesis that vertical co-operative ties are a significant factor in explaining firms’ levels of innovative performance. However, the empirical analysis suggests that it is the strength of such ties - and not just their existence - which are important with stronger dyadic relations between firms having a positive and significant impact upon levels of innovation. The analysis also finds that in some sectors, horizontal co-operative ties are (albeit to a lesser extent) also important.     

Same but different? Research and technology organizations,universities and the innovation activities of firms

Research and Technology Organizations (RTOs) and universities are important elements of countries’ innovation systems. As they are both halfway between science and industry, they are often considered to be the same thing. However, recent studies have stressed the differences between the two. In this paper, we analyze the innovative characteristics (impacts and types of innovation and internal R&D investments) of firms that collaborate with RTOs versus universities. Our study is based on statistical analysis of Community Innovation Survey micro-data (CIS 2012). Our results suggest that firms that see RTOs as more important sources of knowledge than universities have a higher probability of developing service innovation, invest less in internal R&D but are less likely to introduce new, groundbreaking innovations into the market. These results have significant policy and management implications, especially regarding the different but complementary contributions offered respectively by RTOs and universities.     

经济危机对企业研发回报率的影响——基于Perez巨浪模型的实证分析

现有文献主要关注经济危机对企业研发创新的负面影响,同时也指出了危机可带来社会技术范式的变革,从而迎来“黄金时代”。基于Perez巨浪模型,探究在全球范围内危机前后不同企业、行业和国家企业研发回报率的变化趋势。以1986～2014年间全球63个国家的52638个企业年度数据为调查对象,结果表明,经济危机后,不论对企业增长还是利润率而言,企业都获得更高的研发回报率;低市场份额企业的研发回报率提高程度大于高市场份额企业;低杠杆率企业的研发回报率提高程度大于高杠杆企业;服务型企业的研发回报率提高程度大于制造型企业;发展中国家与发达国家企业研发回报率差异不显著。研究结果为Perez的巨浪模型提供了实证支持,并为危机后企业研发提供了管理启示。     

创新领导者和追随者研发投入决策差异——基于产业生命周期的视角

文章引入知识存储量的概念,依据知识存储量不同将企业分为创新领导者和创新追随者两种类型,改进Lee的企业研发(RD)投入技术推动-需求拉动模型,研究知识存储量不同的企业在产业生命周期的不同阶段的研发投入决策差异,基于2012-2015年医药制造业和计算机及办公设备制造业深沪上市企业数据对理论推论进行了实证检验。结果表明:在产业成长期,创新领导者相对于创新追随者更倾向于随市场竞争的加剧提高RD投入强度;在产业成熟期,创新追随者相对于创新领导者更可能提高RD投入强度应对市场竞争。     

Survivor: The role of innovation in firms’ survival

This paper explores the relationship between innovation and the survival probability of manufacturing firms in the Netherlands, conditional on firm age and size. The empirical analysis combines firm level data on innovation, derived from the second Community Innovation Survey, and on the date of exit, from the Business Register of all firms active in the Netherlands. To estimate the survival probability of a firm we use a non-parametric approach, based on the calculation of Transition Probability Matrices over different time periods. The results show that innovation has a positive and significant effect on the probability of firms’ survival. This effect increases over time and is conditional on firm age and size; we observe that small and young firms are the most exposed to the risk of exit, as found in earlier studies, but also those that most benefit of innovation to survive in the market, especially in the longer term.