Modes of innovation in an emerging economy: a firm-level analysis from Mexico

ABSTRACT

Firms that combine both the science, technology, and innovation (STI) and learning-by-doing, learning-by-using, and learning-by-interacting (DUI) modes of innovation are more likely to attain innovation outcomes than those employing either mode separately. Different studies across Europe and Canada support this proposition to different extents. However, the core of these studies has been carried out in advanced economies, inadvertently neglecting other relevant innovation milieus. This study examines the nuances of such innovation strategy in an emerging economy context. We explore differences and potential limitations in the existent literature. The analysis covers 9 628 Mexican firms with 10 or more employees. The results of the logit regressions suggest that a combined STI and DUI innovation approach yields better results in terms of product innovation. Contrary to the existing literature, our results point out that in an emerging economy context, the weight of DUI mode of innovation is larger on product innovation than the STI mode. Finally, DUI mode has a greater impact on process innovation than STI mode as well as the combination of STI and DUI; thus, showing that the benefits of combining STI and DUI are limited only to product innovation.

KEYWORDS:

• Modes of innovation
• STI&DUI
• product innovation
• process innovation
• emerging economies
• Mexico

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the INEGI for providing access to the ESIDET 2012 database in which we ran our analysis. We kindly acknowledge the support of the CONACYT (Mexico) through a graduate scholarship. The conclusions and interpretations expressed in this article are the responsibility of the authors, and they are not part of the official reports and statements of the National Statistic Information System (SNIEG) nor of the INEGI. We are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their useful and relevant suggestions and feedback. The authors bear full responsibility for the limitations that this work entails.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Apanasovich (2016) argues that the measurements proposed by Jensen et al. (2007) mostly characterise internal interactions, both vertically and horizontally, amongst employees and departments within a firm. Parrilli and Elola (2012) also proposed a series of dimensions following Jensen and colleagues’ insights, but these are also classified as internal interactions in Apanasovich’s criteria (2016, p. 733).