Home All Journals Knowledge Management Research & Practice List of Issues Volume 12, Issue 3Critical elements for product innovation ....

Despite the importance of innovation and innovativeness within today’s economy, we know little about how intellectual capital of firms can contribute to a superior innovation at the firm’s level. Based on resources and knowledge-based views of firms we developed a hypothesis linking three dimensions of human capital (component of the intellectual capital) and the innovativeness of firms. As a representation of the firm’s innovativeness, we consider the product, process and management innovation. Using a survey from 68 firms working on the auto components sector, established in the Northern of Spain and Northern of Portugal, we found firstly, that innovativeness has two main dimensions, perfectly differentiated, the product-process innovation and the management innovation; secondly that the human capital dimensions (formation and knowledge creation, innovative behave, and incentives to innovation) influences differently each type of innovativeness capacity. We found that the different human capital dimension influences directly, only, the product-process innovativeness. More specifically only the innovative behavior and the incentives to innovation influence the product-process innovativeness. The formation and knowledge creation dimension doesn’t influence directly either the product-process innovativeness or the management innovativeness. Moreover, none of the human capital dimensions considered influence the management innovativeness directly. These results highlight the importance of human capital on innovative performance, and it allows identification of  the most important dimensions that influence directly the different innovativeness capacities and more broadly, highlight the value of intellectual capital as a competitive advantage in contemporary times.

Purpose:The aim is to try to build a model for measuring and assessing the simultaneous effect of the three components of the intellectual capital (IC) management on the growth of innovative SMEs. In this first stage of research, the model was tested in a representative sample of innovative SMEs from Galicia, where the performance construct was the cumulative growth measured in a three years period. Design/methodology/approach: This empirical work has been designedwith the aim of (1) selecting the best variables from each IC component (human capital-HC, structural capital-SC, and relational capital-RC) at innovative SMEs for explaining cumulative growth; and (2) assessing how much the IC management at innovative SMEs could contribute to their growth. A structural equation model is developed and tested. It allows the identification of the key variables that innovative SMEs are encouraged to manage (17 variables in the current stage) for boosting their growth.Findings: In the Galician case, HC is the basic, starting point for the SMEs' growth. HC seems not to be able to directly influence on growth if not through SC and, in a very low degree, through RC. Thus, the key seems to be the SMEs' capability for transforming valuable knowledge from the HC into organisational value (i.e., SC).

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