Innovative behavior and venture performance of SMEs

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between innovative behavior and firm performance to determine empirically whether managers’ innovative behavior impacts directly or indirectly on firm performance through innovative output. A proposed conceptual model is tested with the moderating effects of environmental dynamism. Design/methodology/approach – An empirical study tests the conceptual model of a multi-industry sample of Tunisian small and medium-sized enterprises. For this analysis the author applies the partial least squares (PLS) technique using the software package SmartPLS, version 2.0. Findings – Empirical findings reveal that innovative behavior acts on innovation output thus having a positive and significant effect on business performance. Direct effect on business performance is found to be positive but weakly significant. These positive relationships tend to decrease when market conditions are highly dynamic. Practical implications – Managers should be aware of the strategic potential of their innovative skills which can reinforce a firm’s innovativeness in order to improve business performance. Originality/value – This paper proposes a model showing how a manager’s innovative behavior affects innovation output thus enhancing firm performance. The proposed conceptual model gives a more specific vision with the introduction of environmental dynamism as a moderating factor.

The Value of Being Innovative in Information Technology

“…Nakata et al (2008) state that IT capability contributes to firms' performance, but this path is not necessarily direct, and the arguments previously presented indicates some contributions that firms can obtain from adequate investments in IT. Considering that innovative behavior has a positive effect on business performance (Omri, 2015) and that product innovations are also important to improve performance (Löfsten, 2014), our arguments indicate that an innovative use of IT creates value for firms. Figure 1 summarizes the research hypothesis of this paper: H1: institutional investors positively evaluate companies that present an innovative IT use.…”

“…The second stage was the selection of Brazilian listed firms with available information to calculate the factors that academic literature indicate as relevant to understand the behavior of stock market (Fama & French, 1993;2015;Carhart, 1997). We excluded of the sample companies with the absence of value for one of these variables, and we also excluded companies of the finance sector, because the operations of this industry are usually different of the other companies.…”

“…We excluded of the sample companies with the absence of value for one of these variables, and we also excluded companies of the finance sector, because the operations of this industry are usually different of the other companies. Therefore, based on previous literature (Fama & French, 1993;2015;Carhart, 1997), year by year, we create (the breakpoint is the median):…”

“…We show that innovative use of IT is perceived by investors as a good sign regarding listed companies. An innovative behavior is a relevant factor for contemporary organizations (Omri, 2015); therefore, institutional investors seem to be willing to buy and keep shares of companies that are innovative in IT use to obtain better performance. Considering that "research on firm resources and capabilities has attracted increasing interest in the past several years" (Helfat, 2000, p. 955), and the increasing of attention to understand the relationship between IT capabilities and firm performance (Santhanam & Hartono, 2003), the evidence reported in this paper can expand and contribute with the studies about IT capabilities and its potential consequents.…”

Interaction between the Knowledge Sharing on Innovation Behavior Based on the Viewpoint of Team Diversity: Empirical Research from China

“…Team diversity Sun et al (2015) mentioned that the defi nition of team diversity would be distinct according to diff erent research fi elds. Researchers on decision making mostly defi ned diversity as the diff erence in information or experience (Ansari et al, 2016), while those on demographic statistics would focus on explicit characteristics of gender, age, and race or work related attributes like competency background and seniority (Omri, 2015). Fransen et al (2015) defi ned diversity as the situation of an actor' attributes towards the preference.…”