Beyond product innovation: deciphering process-oriented innovators, complementarities and performance effects

Abstract

Relatively little attention has been paid to the understanding of process innovation, compared to the well-researched product innovation. This paper contributes to improve our understanding of process innovation and its specific process capabilities and performance by exploring, across many industries, 4,608 processoriented innovators. Process innovation is defined as adoption of technologically new or significantly improved production methods, including changes in equipment, organization or methods of product delivery. Processoriented innovators or process seekers are those firms which usually only introduce process innovation, and no product innovation. These have received less attention by scholars. Results show that process innovation without also organizational innovation complements constrains innovative performance. Complex process-based innovation complementarities result from the simultaneous development and integration of new machinery and organizational innovations.

Does Technological Innovation Drive Corporate Sustainability? Empirical Evidence for the European Financial Industry in Catching-Up and Central and Eastern Europe Countries

“…This literature sustains that internal sources of knowledge (R&D, human resources, routines, know-how, etc.) and external ones (sources of knowledge from the acquisition of embodied knowledge, cooperation with suppliers or universities, among others, also called open innovation by different scholars, (see [53][54][55]) configure the set of innovation capabilities that underpin competitive advantage and drive performance (see [56]). Thus, the virtuous cycle of the innovation capability is based on the firms' ability to identify, access and assimilate and exploit external knowledge, configuring the innovation capability by the joint reinforcing mechanism of both, internal and external sources of knowledge [53].…”

“…The integration of different internal and external sources of knowledge facilitates the creation of unique capabilities from synergistic and complex interrelationships difficult to imitate, contributing thus to improving a firm's competitive advantage, producing inimitable systems that improve one another and create a unique configuration of knowledge that sustains and develops innovation capabilities [56][57][58]. In this line of thought, in this study we refer to innovation capability as the combination of both internal and external sources of knowledge that are structured and combined to pursue innovation.…”

Barriers to radical process innovation: a case of environmental technology in the oil industry

“…As a result of these differences, prior studies focusing on product innovation may not help us to understand process innovation (Damanpour, 2010; Pisano and Shih, 2012; Radnejad and Vredenburg, 2015; Stadler, 2011; Un and Asakawa, 2015). Some firms (named “process seekers” – (Hervas-Oliver et al , 2018)) concentrate on process innovations only, particularly within the “process-intensive” (“process-oriented”) industries supplying homogenous products (Stadler, 2011). In other cases, radical product and process innovations are closely coupled (Hullova et al , 2016), and analyzing the product part only provides an incomplete picture of the barriers to radical innovation.…”

The Contribution of Technological and Non-Technological Innovation to Environmental Performance. An Analysis with a Complementary Approach

“…Therefore, this industry offers a wide margin for the implementation of innovative strategies that lead to an improvement of the environmental impact [25]. The innovation strategy that is most linked to cost reduction is process innovation [35]. Therefore, environmental process innovation is the most important component of the set of environmental innovation types available [25].…”

“…Likewise, the literature on innovation recognizes that organizational innovation plays an important role in the innovation process (e.g., Reference [84]). The main objective of both types of innovation is to reduce costs [35,85]. Therefore, the joint implementation of both types of innovation can generate complementarity or substitutability, depending on whether they reinforce each other or cancel each other out, a question that largely depends on the context.…”