How do companies manage to compete in a marketplace marked by turbulence, and not be outcompeted? In our study we assess the resources used to create resilience in organizations and how each of these resources relates to organizational creativity. We show that organizational resilience is positively related to organizational creativity. Specifically, our study highlights that cognitive, emotional, and structural resources are important resources for organizations wanting to become creative. Our results are based upon a pilot in‐depth qualitative case study followed by a survey of medium‐sized firms.
The results in our study advance the emergent literature on resilience and on the practical applications of resilience in organizations. From a practical point of view, managers may realize that they have to develop a capacity for resilience (i.e. what they have to do) in order to have a creative organization, but a far bigger challenge is to understand the how; how the capacity for resilience is built. Our research shows that if managers truly want to manage in turbulence and still have a creative organization, they need to put a strong emphasis on the soft skills in the organization, in addition to the structural resources.
Purpose
– This paper is concerned with the management and organization of product innovation processes, and how innovation performance relates to business performance. The underlying rationale is that encouraging firms to innovate will lead to a better business performance.
Design/methodology/approach
– This study leverages a data set of 99 medium-sized technology firms in Sweden. The first part of the analysis in this study aims at finding determinants of product innovation processes, and the second part is the analysis and trade-off between innovation performance and business performance. First, a research framework is developed in which the link between strategic dimensions, process dimensions and organizational dimensions of product innovation activity and product innovation performance is tested. Second, the research framework tests the relationship between innovation performance and business performance (sales and profitability).
Findings
– Product innovation performance (patent) is affected by seven variables of the 14 variables that represent product innovation processes. Product innovation performance is not affected by firm size, firm age, branch and product life cycles and, in the regression model, all three innovation performance variables (patents, copyrights and licenses) have a positive effect on the firm's sales, but there were no connections to the firm's profitability.
Originality/value
– The main implication of the study is the idea supporting a multi-aspects approach to the product innovation processes and performance since product innovation process dimensions (variables used in the study) have only partial influence on innovation-/business performance.
Science parks provide an important resource network for new technology‐based firms (NTBFs). To ascertain the ‘added value’ of a science park location the innovativeness of independent technology‐based science park firms are compared with the levels recorded by a comparable group of firms not located on a park. The hypotheses are empirically tested on the basis of 263 new technology‐based firms in Sweden located both on and off‐park. The survey endeavoured to cover joint‐stock firms located on the nine target science parks (163 firms). The remainder of the NTBFs were drawn from off‐park locations (100 firms). The findings on science parks performance suggest that the parks milieu appear to have a positive impact on their firms growth as measured in terms of sales and jobs. However, there was no evidence of a direct relationship between science park location and profitability. While this research provided several new insights into science parks in Sweden, numerous questions remain.
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