Understanding the Antecedents, Contingencies, and Performance Implications of Process Innovation: A Dynamic Capabilities Perspective

Abstract

This paper examines one of the most important sources of competitiveness in dynamic industries-the capability of firms to introduce process innovations. While the management of product innovation has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention in the literature, our knowledge about how firms become process innovators-and why many firms fail to do so-remains underdeveloped. In order to provide novel insights into the configuration of firms' process innovation activities and their performance implications, this paper draws on the dynamic capabilities approach. More specifically, this study aims to shed light on the antecedents, contingencies, and performance consequences of interfirm differences in process innovation success, that is, firms' propensity and effectiveness of implementing new production, supply chain, or administrative processes. Particular emphasis is placed upon the analysis of potential complementarities or substitution effects between innovation activities such as internal and external research and development, prototyping, external knowledge acquisition, and employee training. Cross-sectional data from a large-scale survey of German manufacturing and service firms serves as the basis for testing the hypotheses advanced in this paper. Findings suggest that by engaging in a broad range of different innovation activities, firms can indeed increase the likelihood of achieving process innovation success, which is in turn positively related to firm financial performance. Yet decreasing marginal returns to innovation activities have to be considered as process innovation propensity was found to increase with the number of activities pursued simultaneously only up to a point, after which negative marginal returns set in (inverted U-shaped relationship). Furthermore, while environmental turbulence was found to have surprisingly little influence when it comes to translating process innovation success into firms' subsequent financial performance, industry membership as well as the nature of the innovation process (i.e., internal generation, external adoption, or cocreation of an innovation) emerged as key contingency factors. These findings have important theoretical as well as practical implications for managing new process introductions.

Product and process innovation in manufacturing firms: a 30-year bibliometric analysis

“…The authors claim that future studies on the innovativeness-survival connection pay careful attention to two types of survivorship biases, namely bias of ideas and bias of survivorship with a particular focus on manufacturing startups. As already mentioned in the literature review, very few studies have focused on process innovation., The study by Piening and Salge (2015)noted that the knowledge about how firms become process innovators is still underdeveloped. The authors offer a seminal contribution by connecting process innovation to dynamic capabilities.…”

A Influência Da Geração X E Y Na Inovação De Produto E Processo Na Indústria Metalmecânica Do Rio Grande Do Sul

“…Destaca-se, também, que a inovação de processos pode trazer benefícios para a organização, posto que pode acarretar um papel significativo na redução de custos da produção e do produto, aumentando a competitividade na capacidade industrial da organização (Bernstein, Kok & Meca, 2015;Piening & Salge, 2015;Pan& Li, 2016;Wang & Juan, 2015).…”

“…No que diz respeito à inovação de processo, é considerada pelas organizações como um método ou um processo novo ou aprimorado, especialmente, pela introdução de novas tecnologias de produção e novos métodos (Ocde, 2005 Corroborando com a fala dos entrevistados E2 e E3, destaca-se que a inovação de processo sofre influências benéficas das fontes de informações, as quais são conhecidas como fontes internas e externas (Ocde, 2005 Ressalta-se, também, que a inovação de processos pode trazer benefícios para a organização, posto que pode proporcionar uma redução significativa de custos da produção e do produto, tornando-se mais competitiva, pela introdução de inovações de processos (Bernstein, Kok & Meca, 2015;Piening & Salge, 2015;Pan, Li & 2016;Wang & Juan, 2015 Neste cenário, pode-se identificar que as cinco empresas desenvolveram inovações de processos. Tais organizações, convergem com o exposto por Hyll e Pippel (2016), tornando-se mais competitivas e inovadoras, pois o investimento em novos processos estimula novas ideias a fim de criar um cenário propício à inovação.…”

Employees’ intrapreneurial engagement Initiatives and its influence on organisational survival

“…"Corporate entrepreneurship refers to a top-down process, i.e. a management strategy to foster workforce initiatives and efforts to innovate and develop new business while intrapreneurship relates to the individual level and is about bottom-up, proactive work related initiatives of individual employees" (Piening and Salge 2015). As noted by Azami (2013) intrapreneurship motivates employees to come up with distinctive business initiatives without necessarily taking formal permission from the management.…”