Essays on factors affecting firms’ innovation performance

Abstract

In the past, firms constantly focused on internal innovation to survive in competition, but today, it is inevitable to properly utilize external resources or cooperate with competitors if necessary. In other words, firms must adapt sensitively to external environmental changes as well as internal capabilities in order to generate innovative performances. From this point of view, the concepts of technology cooperation, strategic technology partnership, and open innovation, which are often mentioned in previous studies, differ in scope and perspective, but are one of the corporate innovation strategies to actively respond to the external environment. While many studies on corporate innovation so far have focused on exploring individual factors affecting innovation, studies to analyze the configurational paths derived through interaction between innovation factors have been limited. This thesis aims to identify the configurational paths that affect companies to create innovation performances. Since innovation theory does not have a uniform effect on all companies, it is necessary to examine various factors at the same time. The internal capabilities of companies, external resources, and the influence of the government derived from previous studies were set as potential innovation factors, and configurational paths between them were derived. The purpose of 1st essay is to reveal the paths of how absorptive capacity and government support combine for SMEs to create innovation performance based on external information resources. In addition, this essay investigates the configurational paths for SMEs' innovation creation depending on their industrial environment by comparing analyses of industry types. I used data from 1,421 Korean SMEs in the manufacturing sector based on the 2018 Korea Innovation Survey data and conducted a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The results show that there are four product innovation paths and two process innovation paths in the high-tech industry, and six product innovation paths, and four process innovation paths in the low-tech industry. This study presents the academic contributions by identifying the configurational paths of the factors based on the resource-based view, dynamic capability, and contingency theory. In addition, it shows that by comparing industry types that reflect technological characteristics, the direction of innovation activities and the path to generating innovation performance vary depending on the business environment to which SMEs belong. Therefore, managers and policymakers must consider different industrial environments of SMEs when combining external information resources, government support, and internal absorptive capacity to create innovation. This dissertation not only derived individual factors but also identified the configurational paths between them by analyzing various cases of what efforts companies should make to create innovation performance. Therefore, this dissertation contributed academically by providing a deep understanding of corporate innovation and creation. In addition, even if it belongs to the same industry, firm establish R&D strategies or suggest implications for government support by demonstrating that the type and performance of innovation vary depending on the company's innovation capabilities and external environment.