Exploring the Context Dependence of Firms’ Innovation Activities
Abstract
How do firms adjust their innovation activities to their situational and contextual setting? The extant literature does not provide a clear answer to this question as the context moves away from high-tech industries and R&D based innovations. This theoretical gap is reflected in the managerial practice in form of hardship in managing innovation in “low-tech” industries and underestimating the non-R&D opportunities of innovation across industries. This dissertation intends to contribute to filling this gap through addressing the following research questions: 1) What is the role of industry characteristics in determining the firm's decision regarding innovation both in an active decision making environment and in reaction to performance shortfall problems? And 2) what are the firm-specific factors that contribute to a firm's innovativeness and approach to innovation specially as measured by non-R&D proxies? I use three different datasets and methods each building part of the puzzle to provide a clear picture. In the first essay, I investigate the industry and firm characteristics that lead to choice of R&D and non-R&D forms of innovation in response to problems and propose theoretical insights that I verify using data on financial activities of public firms. In the second essay, I conduct a meta-analysis of innovation publications that uncovers the importance of non-cash input (absorbed slack) to firms’ innovativeness and identify the setting that such input makes the most impact. Finally, in the third essay, I use unique data about innovation activities of Canadian public and private firms to distinctly study the innovation approaches of resource industries – as one of the neglected industries in the innovation literature – and investigate how innovation in these industries is induced, measured, and utilized.
Description
Keywords
Business Administration--Management
Citation
MahdaviMazdeh, H. (2017). Exploring the Context Dependence of Firms’ Innovation Activities (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26106