- Author(s): Diana Suárez.
- Year: 2015.
This paper analyzes changes in the firm’s innovative strategy and how this impacts firm’s performance. The methodology is based on a cluster analysis over 800 Argentinean manufacturing firms with information from Argentinean Innovation (1998-2006). The period under analysis includes deep changes in the environment and provides good reasons to expect changes in the firms’ strategic behavior. Results show that some firms did change the strategy but some did not. A set of continuous innovative firms sustained a high-profile innovation-oriented strategy, with high productivity gains. Another group of firms also sustained the strategy, but a non-innovative one. Between these groups, a set of new innovative firms changed their strategy and caught up with investments based on high levels of capabilities, and this also led them to high productivity levels. Finally, a set of sporadic innovative firms show an erratic behavior associated with abandoned innovation investments which were not enough to impact firms’ performance. The preliminary conclusion is that understanding how firms’ strategies change over time is a key matter to understand how innovation impacts performance. This challenges path dependence literature and empirical approaches based on averaged innovation trajectories. Findings show that what the firm did on the past can predict only partially what the firm will do in the future. Therefore, there is not an average innovative behavior but heterogeneous responses which lead to different interactions between innovation and performance.
Key Words:
Innovation, firms’ strategy, performance