What is it about?
How the development of sustainable and traditional product innovation strategies is conditioned by the business’ learning capabilities and entrepreneurial orientation in knowledge-intensive (KIBS) and non-knowledge-intensive businesses. Both of them high-performance businesses. We find sustainable and traditional product innovation without scale and experience, but only for knowledge-intensive business (KIBS) in a developing country (Costa Rica).
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Why is it important?
From an academic perspective, prior work on the determinants of product innovation has traditionally focused on specific industries in developed contexts. The proposed analysis of the strategic configurations of product innovation in Costa Rican high-performance businesses extends the rich literature on product innovation, as well as the growing research work on product innovation in SMEs operating in developing economies. Additionally, by employing fuzzy set analysis to scrutinize the strategic configurations of sustainable and traditional product innovation in businesses operating in multiple industries (knowledge-intensive and non-knowledge-intensive), this study shows not only that the potential strategic configurations of product innovation are heterogeneous across firms, but also that operational characteristics linked to the creation and exploitation of knowledge-based resources as well as relevant organizational features—i.e., business size and market experience—are critical aspects that shape product innovation strategies across industries.
Perspectives
We think that, for strategy makers, the results that—regardless their size and market experience—KIBS firms achieve superior production innovation levels suggest that the ability of these businesses for creating a connection between knowledge-based processes and the end customer via strong communication channels is a key component of their product innovation equation. Also, our results confirm that product innovation is not exclusive domain of large businesses with the capacity to allocate large amounts of resources to product innovation projects.
Juan Carlos Leiva
Instituto Tecnólogico de Costa Rica
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Sustainable and Traditional Product Innovation without Scale and Experience, but Only for KIBS!, Sustainability, April 2018, MDPI AG,
DOI: 10.3390/su10041169.
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