Beyond product innovation: deciphering process-oriented innovators, complementarities and performance effects

ABSTRACT

Relatively little attention has been paid to the understanding of process innovation, compared to the well-researched product innovation. This paper contributes to improve our understanding of process innovation and its specific process capabilities and performance by exploring, across many industries, 4,608 process-oriented innovators. Process innovation is defined as adoption of technologically new or significantly improved production methods, including changes in equipment, organisation or methods of product delivery. Process-oriented innovators or process seekers are those firms which usually only introduce process innovation, and no product innovation. These have received less attention by scholars. Results show that process innovation without also organisational innovation complements constrains innovative performance. Complex process-based innovation complementarities result from the simultaneous development and integration of new machinery and organisational innovations.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation performance
• process-oriented innovators
• embodied knowledge
• non-technical innovation
• organisational innovation
• resource-based view

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jose-Luis Hervas-Oliver, PhD, is Professor at the Universitat Politècnica Valencia (Spain). His research interests are located at the intersection of strategic management and innovation. He teaches strategic management and innovation topics at both postgraduate and undergraduate levels. Dr Hervas-Oliver has been a Visiting Scholar in the London School of Economics and Political Science and the MERIT-Maastricht University, among many others. Dr Hervas-Oliver has been published in leading journals such as Research Policy, Regional Studies, Technovation, Journal of Business Research, Small Business Economics, Journal of Economic Geography, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, Journal of Technology Transfer, Research-Technology Management, International Journal of Technology Management, Economics of Innovation and New Technology, among many others. He has also edited books about innovation in leading editorials as Springer, and contributed to books in Edward Elgar, Springer, among others.

Francisca Sempere-Ripoll earned her PhD at the Universitat Politècnica Valencia, where she teaches innovation and management. She has also been published in leading journals such as Regional Studies, Small Business Economics, Technology Analysis and Strategic Management or Journal of Business Research, among others and books edited by Springer and other world-wide recognised editorials.

Ronald Rojas-Alvarado earned his PhD at the Universitat Politècnica Valencia, Spain, and now he is teaching at ICESI University, Cali, Colombia. He has also been published in leading journals such as Regional Studies or Technology Analysis and Strategic Management, among others.

Sofia Estelles-Miguel, earned her PhD at the Universitat Politècnica Valencia, where she teaches innovation and management. She has also been published in leading journals such as Regional Studies, among others and also in books edited by Springer and other world-wide recognised editorials.

Notes

1 In this paper, however, super-modularity (Milgrom and Roberts 1995) is not analyzed.

2 More info at: http://www.ine.es/dyngs/INEbase/en/operacion.htm?c=Estadistica_C&cid=1254736176755&menu=metodologia&idp=1254735576669.

3 More results available upon request.

4 The Inverse Mill ratio from the Probit model turns out to be non-significant (p > 5%), suggesting that the sample obtained does not suffer from selection biases.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Spanish Ministry of Economics [grant number ECO2015-63645-R].