This article integrates internationalisation, and specifically exporting, into a conceptualisation of how innovation production leads to productivity performance in microbusinesses employing fewer than 10 people. Innovation production is reframed for the microbusiness context by focusing on knowledge acquisition and formalisation rather than on research and development (R&D) activity. Propensity score matching analysis is used to investigate British microbusiness survey data. It finds a causal process in which innovation promotes exporting activity. This in turn leads to improved productivity. In contrast to research on larger businesses, this study finds no direct link between innovation production and productivity. These findings are robust to various checks for potential endogeneity arising from feedback into innovation from internationalisation and from self-selection of high productivity firms into exporting.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.