Enhancing Innovation Performance in Companies

Abstract

I nnovation, in particular open innovation, are becoming increasingly recognized by companies and governments alike as being important for both national and corporate growth and performance. This is so critical that countries around the world have launched programs and policies designed to enhance their countries' innovation performance and companies have focused efforts in this area as well. The latest such initiative being the appointment of senior-level open innovation executives in the "C" suite by leading companies around the world. For governments, it is generally about developing policy and programs that will improve their countries' rankings in innovation publications such as the Global Innovation Index. For companies, it is about increasing revenues, reducing costs, and enhancing competitive advantages. How one helps grow innovation has been a subject of intense interest not only for government and industry but for academia as well. A recent search on ABI ProQuest for peer reviewed articles with innovation in their title resulted in 24,532 articles, including 13,933 published since 2010, with many studies looking at activities related to innovation. The literature is so deep that many meta-analysis and literature review articles have emerged that are not just about the generic innovation field but subdomains within innovation, for example: • a meta-analysis of success factors for service innovation [Storey et al., 2015]; • a bibliometric review of the open innovation literature [Randhawa et al., 2016];

Examining the Role of Partners in Improving Innovation Performance

“…Innovation is now understood to be crucial to the successful grown of entities, and identification of effective means of increasing innovation performance is now a focus not only of companies, but of entire nations (Calof, 2018). Innovation involves many stages, with various activities and partners involved in each stage (Scott & Bruce, 1994).…”