An Assessment of the Innovativeness of Firms in Nigeria’s Petroleum Sector

Abstract

A firm's level of innovativeness is regarded as an indicator of its creativity, competitiveness, and performance. An understanding of the processes that lead to innovativeness is therefore crucial to scholars and practitioners. This makes innovativeness assessment a necessity, especially for firms. Perplexingly, there are few innovativeness studies on resource-intensive industrial sectors, such as petroleum, in African countries. This paper is a contribution to filling the knowledge gap. The study used item means to analyse data from a cross-sectional survey. The findings show that, while overall the petroleum firms were barely innovative, they performed better in terms of the non-technological aspects of innovativeness. OPSOMMING ʼn Firma se vlak van innovasie word as ʼn aanduiding van sy kreatiwiteit, kompeterendheid en vertoning geag. Die begrip van die prosesse wat lei tot innovasie is dus krities vir navorsers en praktisyne. Dit maak innovasie assessering ʼn noodsaaklikheid, veral vir firmas. Tog is daar min studies wat die innovasievlak in hulpbron intensiewe industrieë, soos die petroleum-industrie, in Afrika. Hierdie artikel probeer om dié leemte aan te spreek. Die studie het data van ʼn deursnitpeiling gebruik en die bevindinge toon dat, alhoewel petroleumfirmas beswaarlik innoverend was, hulle beter gevaar het in terme van die nie-tegnologiese fasette van innovasie.