The effect of public support on senior manager attitudes to innovation

Abstract

Forthcoming in Technovation (https://doi. ABSTRACT Senior manager innovation-orientated attitudes are key drivers of innovation within micro and smaller firms.Despite this, little guidance exists on the initiatives organisations can utilise to induce and strengthen such desirable attitudes. In this paper, we investigate whether innovation vouchers, an increasingly prevalent form of public innovation support that funds short-term collaborative projects to solve innovation problems for micro and smaller firms, influence senior manager innovation-orientated attitudes. We use a treatment effects approach to examine our question, specifically, propensity score nearest neighbour matching on a U.K. dataset of firms that received an innovation voucher between 2012 and 2015, and a control group of those that did not. Overall, we find that innovation vouchers induce small positive changes in senior manager innovation-orientated attitudes, with the largest change observed for senior manager openness to external knowledge, followed by risk tolerance.Overall, we show innovation vouchers strengthen senior manager innovation-orientated attitudes, thus advancing insights into the determinants of innovation-orientated attitudes and the additionality effects of public support programmes. We discuss implications for innovation policy and practice.

A Conceptual Framework: Organizational Learning, Competencies, and Innovation in Indonesian Digital Startup

“…The variation in the effect of OL on OI [50], [61], [62] indicates the presence of other factors that mediate both. Because CD is an OL output which also contains the knowledge required by OI, logically CD has the potential to be a mediating factor between OL and OI.…”

Enhancing SME innovation performance

“…Specifically, Hsu et al (2009) claim that innovation subsidies cause changes in a firm's strategy. Chapman and Hewitt-Dundas (2018) argue that subsidies can induce small positive changes in managerial attitudes toward innovation. Subsidies also might stimulate organizational learning, thereby improving organizational competencies and behaviour (Antonioli et al, 2014;Autio et al, 2008).…”

“…Busso et al (2014) recommend including control variables if they are expected to influence both the treatment selection process and the outcome variable, to prevent estimation bias. Accordingly, we include firm age (age and age squared, similar to Karhunen and Huovari, 2015), because older firms may be more reluctant to innovate (Balasubramanian and Lee, 2008;Chapman and Hewitt-Dundas, 2018), such that they might apply less often for innovation subsidies, and their employees might be less inclined to be involved in innovation processes. We also control for firm size, measured as the logarithm of the number of employees (Huergo and Jaumandreu, 2004); we take the logarithm to avoid biases due to skewness of the data (Aerts and Schmidt, 2008).…”

“…The measurement items, obtained from Carbonell et al (2009), are "Our products give us an important competitive advantage" and "The product experience of our customers was superior to the product experience with competitors." We test the longitudinal effect of the level of employee involvement in 2014 on product innovation performance in 2016, controlling for firm age, firm size and diversity of innovation partners, because firm age and size affect innovation processes (Chapman and Hewitt-Dundas, 2018;Huergo and Jaumandreu, 2004), and research indicates that the diversity of innovation partners can encourage innovation success (Classen et al, 2012; Laursen and Salter,…”

“…Gök and Edler (2012) assert that a true understanding of behavioural additionality also requires consideration of its internal dynamics. For example, innovation subsidies can lead to upgraded internal competencies or induce changes in senior managers' innovation-oriented attitudes (Antonioli et al, 2014;Chapman and Hewitt-Dundas, 2018). However, detailed knowledge about which internal competencies or processes improve is lacking.…”