Persistence of various types of innovation analyzed and explained

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThis paper analyzes the persistency in innovation behavior of firms. Using five waves of the Community Innovation Survey in Sweden, we have traced the innovative behavior of firms over a ten-year period, i.e., between 2002 and 2012. We distinguish between four types of innovations: process, product, marketing, and organizational innovations. First, using transition probability matrix, we found evidence of (unconditional) state dependence in all types of innovation, with product innovators having the strongest persistent behavior. Second, using a dynamic probit model, we found evidence of "true" state dependency among all types of innovations, except marketing innovators. Once again, the strongest persistency was found for product innovators.

The role of regional context on innovation persistency of firms

“…Then conditional on being innovative in time t ( Y i , t = 1), a firm i may persist to innovative in the subsequent period as well, which can be formally stated as below: where ρ shows the magnitude of the persistency. While previous research generally shows that ρ is significantly different from zero (Ganter and Hecker ; Tavassoli and Karlsson ), our argument is that such effect also depends on the regional context, where firm is located. This implies that if we break down the ρ depending on where the firms is located, then the ρ r 1 , ρ r 2 , … ρ rn should not show equal magnitude to each other.…”

“…Marketing innovation is the type of innovation where labour market thickness does not matter for enhancing persistency patterns (except a weak significance for medium level market thickness, which can be discarded). Previous studies indeed show that marketing innovators are not persistent innovators, mainly because these firms do not want to confuse their customers by persistently changing their marketing activities (such as packaging and pricing strategy) while the main product is the same (Tavassoli and Karlsson ). Our result shows that incorporating the labour market thickness does not change that picture.…”

“…It is well established in the literature that the innovation behaviour of many firms is characterized by persistence and that this prevails for product, process, organizational as well as market innovation but to a varying degree (Ganter and Hecker ; Tavassoli and Karlsson ). At a general level, innovation persistence has been explained by a firm's internal learning effects and knowledge accumulation from earlier innovation processes through positive feed‐back mechanisms generating dynamic scale economies (Geroski et al ).…”

Firms’ innovation benefiting from networking and institutional support: A global analysis of national and firm effects

“…Recent CIS and OECD guidelines, however, encompass other kinds of innovation, e.g. innovation in marketing and organizations (Tavassoli and Karlsson, 2015), also in the public sector (Arundel et al, 2015). The CIS and GEM surveys are somewhat similar, in that both encompass process-innovation and product-innovation, and in that newness does not mean new to the world, but may be quite local.…”

Well-being in the Context of Innovation Resistance

“…For example, it was revealed that the company can show resistance to various types of innovation (Tavassoli, & Karlsson, 2015). It should also be noted that in the framework of enterprise innovation resistance can occur at any hierarchical level of company management and with different degree of impact (Agocs, 1997).…”