Authors: Matti Tuominen; Saara Hyvonen
Research in marketing and strategic management has extensively explored how firm resources and capabilities affect business performance by adopting various types of strategic trade-offs that firms realize. In this concern, extant channel management literature has devoted only scant attention to strategic issues and to the assessment of the relative benefits of emphasizing one capability over another (Vorhies and Morgan 2003), while putting main interest on inter-firm links in marketing channels, and on such notions like power, commitment and trust. Our study addresses this gap by exploring the extent of consequences of organizational innovation capability on the level of a firm’s competitive superiority, and, further, whether the external contingencies involved affect this association.Our survey was carried out in early summer 2002. The final questionnaire was mailed to 1400 firms in Finland from a sampling frame (supplied by TOY-Research Ltd., Finland) covering small, medium and large firms representing consumer products, business products, business services, and consumer services. Similar studies are underway in other countries (e.g. UK, Ireland, Austria, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Australia and New Zealand) and at various stages of completion to allow the international robustness of the scales to be gauged.Our results clearly support the basic argument: innovation capability is a key prerequisite for success in business performance. In this process, the supply chain adopted and the prevailing channel dynamism influence the key processes of value creation and value appropriation. We provide strong empirical evidence for prior demonstrations that innovation capability positively influences firm competitive superiority and survival under uncertain conditions in channel environment. We also reaffirmed that innovation capability, as a vital requisite for superior performance, warrants firm attention for successful implementation of both managerial and technological kinds as formerly forwarded by several scholars. Our results for the innovation-performance link not only underscore the separate contributions of managerial and technological innovations to firm competitiveness but also lend support to synergies between the two types of capabilities enhancing firm superior performance.
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Publish Year: 2003
Conference: Lugano, Switzerland (2003)