Innovation Activities

Our analysis extends the existing research by examining how investor protection resulted from country-level and firm-level governance standards influence the relationship between market disciplines resulted from firm-level accounting disclosure and innovation activities. Compared with Hasan et al., (2014a), this paper discomposes the overall firm-level corporate governance into two components such as accounting disclosure and non-disclosure governance and examines the individual and interaction effects of these two components on firms’ innovation activities. In the next section, we describe the data. Section 3 presents results. Section 4 provides conclusions.

provide the theoretical background of the adopted Generalized Lineal Model theory, so crucial in any Risk Analysis problem and we also extensively discuss the Greek case of female participation in innovation activities of firms. We are relying on the results of a research project on women in innovation, technology and science, based on 279 questionnaires selected on a two years time period (2004-2006), when 2200 questionnaires were delivered across the country, to firms with more than 20 employees. In this paper cconcerning the female participation in innovations a number of variables are used. Specifically, the total number of women employees by age, by education level, by firm size and by sector, as well as women in product and in process innovations, their position in the firm (owner, manager) and finally equality in job enrichment, in salary, in education–training and in promotion.

Þ A regular, concise, yearly, census on innovation in industry (mining, manufacturing and utilities sectors) in enterprises with more than 49 employees, covering selected basic variables of innovation activities such as expenditure on innovation and domestic and export sales of innovative products as well as transfer of technology; the regular census survey on innovation activity in industry, which was launched by GUS at the beginning of the 1980s, has evolved over time, responding to changing user needs, with the recent introduction of additional questions concerning such problems as the use of information (IT) and advanced manufacturing (AMT) technologies, of which the Internet, or the implementation of quality assurance standards or advanced management techniques. Þ Comprehensive, periodic surveys on innovation in industry and in marketed service

Innovation conduce to getting competitive advantage and they increase effi ciency and total com- pany performance. They are generally deemed as a key development factor. They represent group of activities leading to successful production, absorption and using economical and social innova- tion. Well managed and successfully introduced innovation into the market represents the tool for the companies, by means of which they can reach competitive advantages, enabling their prosperity in the slump. The urgency of synergic entrepreneurship as a key support of innovation is point out on a base of primary research in South Moravian manufacturing companies. As it is mentioned in this paper, most of respondents are open to external cooperation in innovation activities. Furthermore, they admit that without this collaboration they will not be able to produce any innovative products. Suitable forms, which can be utilized in our companies, are carried out with the help of secondary re- search in the article as well. Their accomplishments and disabilities are compared in accordance with local and foreign experts’ theories. What follows is a discussion about requirements of strategic part- nership success and advantages in the area of innovation.

Earlier approaches to innovation activities are based on the fact that the firm is the best place for innovation and the implementation of innovation processes (Gambardella, 1992; Siddharthan, 1992; Kumar & Saqib, 1996; Veugelers & Cassiman, 1999). In these, processes took place without external interactions, and information from competitors and other external players was very rarely incorporated. The substance of this "lock-in strategy" was to keep the emerging innovation secret and not to allow competitors to respond before the firm was able to put the innovations on the market. The advantages of this approach are gaining a competitive advantage in the market, the broad commercialization of innovation, and obtaining additional funds for expanding innovation and financing subsequent in-house R&D activities (Narula, 2002; Chesbrough, 2010). The disadvantages include the time required for creating innovation and the inability to share the costs of research and development – moreover, it was not possible to share knowledge. This type of firm must make a large investment into R&D facilities and technologies; such firms have very high costs for organizing and managing in-house innovation. Frequently, even these high costs did not create enough pressure on the firms to cause them to approach the market and obtain the necessary knowledge and technology there. However, there are some

At the same time, numerous models have been pro- posed to study the relationships between innovation be- havior and firms’ performance. Hurley and Halt analyze innovation activities considering that some structural and process characteristics (size, resources, age, planning, development and control of activities, information man- agement, etc.) influence innovation capacity [9]. More- over, cultural characteristics (market orientation, partici- pative decision process, and so on) affect innovation re- ceptiveness. The innovation capacity, its receptiveness and structural process, and cultural characteristics determine firm’s competitive advantage.

Not only innovations are important for job creations, but also human resources are important for innova- tion process which can be defined as human, social and creative capital in innovation. Human factors and, in particular, education, knowledge and experience are considered key components of successful innovation today, since the human element is involved in the whole innovation process. In recent years, scholars have shown a growing interest in the role of human resources in stimulating organizational innovation performance (e.g. De Leede & Looise, 2005; Beugelsdijk, 2008; Chen & Huang, 2009; De Winne & Sels, 2010). Innovation process and the performance can be studied under the notions of exploration and exploitation (March, 1991; Gupta et al., 2006). Exploration involves searching for new knowledge, technologies and products, whereas exploitation is about using and refining existing knowledge, technologies and products (Li et al., 2008). Ac- cording to Nonaka et al. (1995), knowledge, skills, attitudes and other characteristics play a critical role in innovation. This approach can be distinguished in three main concepts: human, social and creative capital. On the firm-level, human capital is “the aggregate accumulation of individual human capital that can be combined in a way that creates value for the unit” (Wright & McMahan, 2011). The concept of social capital is often used to highlight the potential benefit for innovation of interactions through relationships (Laursen et al., 2012). Innovation is rarely formed in isolated environment and often occurs with trust, shared knowl- edge, and other elements linked to group processes. The concept of creative capital was introduced in 2002; Florida (2004) expresses the concept as “why some places are better able to develop, attract, and retain human capital/skills/creative capabilities”. All mentioned concepts need strong policy-making capability and implementation in order to create strong linkage between human resources and innovation activities.

However, without putting innovations on the market, the implementation process is not complete and, therefore, innovation cannot be considered realized. Therefore, activities related to preparation of the market and relevant marketing activities for promotion of a new product have to take place in parallel with solution of technical problems. Even though a prepared product is technically perfect, there is no guarantee that people will accept it and utilize it in the long term. Therefore, if innovation should be successful, it has to be not only feasible, but also its result, the new product, has to be marketable. It has to catch the interest of customers and invoke their willingness to buy this product. Therefore, an important aspect aff ecting the perception of its output, e.g. behaviour of customers on target markets, cannot be forgotten in innovation activities. At the same time, in their work, the German authors, Trommsdorff and Steinhoff (2009) declare that in their opinion, a large part of variations of success or failure is caused by factors that can be ranked with marketing in the broader sense of the word. Among them, there are strategic, as well as operative decisions and information from market research, from which such decisions are derived. In every case, such factors are linked to behaviour of target customers and competition. It is precisely the target market that decides if an innovation is accepted and, therefore, an innovation process successfully completed, e.g. Tidd, Bassant and Pavitt (2007).

Nevertheless, several analyses [6], [32] of traditional wikis as shown that they are not enough structured, and it‘s difficult to navigate and to find the relevant information. Be- sides, the wiki markup language (WikiML) used by most wiki engines makes internet users reluctant to contribute to the wiki. One solution to perform the ideas creation, evaluation and navigation inside wikis is to use technologies from the Semantic Web [2] to formalized information, content, structures and links in the wiki pages. These Wikis would take consideration of the semantic in their content management and become Semantic Wikis. ―Semantic Wiki‖ systems aim to combine ―traditional‖ wiki systems with Semantic Technology. This combination bears much potential in many application areas. Thus we propose to use a Semantic Innovation Wiki approach to propose a system to facilitate the creativity and to formalize ideas in the innovation activities by facilitating the knowledge sharing, updating and evaluation.

Many rural areas are among the most dynamic territories in the European Union, whereas many others suffer due to low population density a lack of basic services and an inadequate labour market and low basic infrastructure. Innovation activities and new technologies contribute substantially towards the modernisation process and the competitiveness level. It is quite important to develop the countryside as a space for recreation and «green tourism», in order to support the renovation of the villages, encourage agriculture and forestry in their function of maintaining landscapes and respect the environment and natural resources.

Food industry innovations are often aimed at de- veloping important replacement products, follow- ing nutritional directions, or obeying food additive regulations. They are generally new or improved consumer products and services, and can be focused in one area of food technology (for example process engineering, product formulation, food qualities or consumer needs). Moreover, they have to combine technological innovation with social and cultural innovation, in order to produce food that satisfies the nutritional, personal and social needs of all com- munities. Innovations may occur throughout all parts of the food chain, and a possible classification of food innovations can be: (1) New food ingredients and materials, (2) Innovations in fresh foods, (3) New food processing techniques, (4) Innovations in food quality, (5) New packaging methods, and (6) New distribution or retailing methods ( Jones and Jew 2007; Siro et al. 2008; Annunziata and Vecchio 2011). To summarise these findings, it can be said that if we are analysing individual food companies, then there are four main categories of innovations: Product in- novation, Process innovation, Market innovation, and Organisational innovation (Trienekens and Zuurbier 2008; Baregheh et al. 2012). Traill and Meulenberg (2002) suggest that food companies behave differently and choose the innovation types depending on their dominant orientation towards products or processes or the market, their ownership, size, market size and scope. Furthermore, some innovation activities are also dependent on cultural and geographical char- acteristics (Iliopoulos et al. 2012).

The London School of Economics and Political Science International and Innovation Activities of Firms Claudia Steinwender A thesis submitted to the Department of Economics of the London School of Econ[.]

One of the major findings of this work is that idea generation techniques and employee suggestion schemes are used not to generate new ideas, business opportunities or innovations but rather to allow advisors to be involved within the contact centre. The main driver for innovation activities within the contact centre industry is for employee involvement and participation, not innovation. If the value of employees’ suggestions was seen as something that can bring economic benefit to the contact centre then it is thought that the innovation activities would become a great focus for centre management – rather than the lip service that is often paid to the innovation activities within the industry. Even contact centres that had an innovation focus were lacking in their ability to manage the innovation activities beyond the fuzzy front end of idea generation and collection. Further work needs to be undertaken to analyse the ideas generated within contact centres and the potential impact they could have on both the contact centre and the wider organisation because at the moment this is not clear.

According to K. Koschatzky (2009), with regard to the level of ‘region’ for which conclusions about its policy making abilities should be drawn, different qualifications and objectives of its policy makers can be found. The lower the hierarchical level, the more regional policy makers are routed in routines of regional infrastructural policy and planning. Compared to “brick and mortar” infrastructural development, innovation policy displays other characteristics. The uncertainty by which innovation processes are characterised (C. Freeman, L. Soete, 1997) holds true for innovation policy as well. Contrary to the focus on infrastructure development of classical regional policy, it is by far more difficult to attain intended results in the promotion of an innovation friendly environment or by providing incentives for network formation. Results are not clearly visible within a short-term perspective and cannot be pre-sented to the public like the inauguration of a building or a road. Due to different approaches and the non-linearity of policy input and the intended output, a high degree of experimentalism in policy making is needed (K. Koschatzky 2009).

In today’s business world, the only constant is a change, so that the ability to learn, change and innovate plays an important role in business. Enterprises should actively create rules of the game and own future rather than passively react to changes (Mikoláš & Wozniaková, 2009; Merrill, 2015). Proactive behavior, seeking own way (Zelený, 2012) and creating innovator’s DNA is important (Dyer et al., 2011). Innovation and own recipe (Pearl, 2011) for its implementation is a necessary prerequisite for successful business in the highly competitive business environment. For companies’ future existence and development, innovations importance was recognized by a number of business owners and managers, who introduce changes and contribute to the creation of new trends in the business environment. Such enterprises become innovators in their fi eld of operation. According to some authors (Košturiak & Chal´, 2008; Szabo et al., 2013), business success is not caused by optimization of existing products and processes, but by innovations. Innovations have become a key objective for many companies due to their impact on overall company performance (Lee, 2008).

The study intends to examine the role of transformational leadership on innovation and marketing performance of SME and to investigate how the dimensions of transformational leadership moderate the effect of innovation and marketing per- formance. The study was conducted with data gathered from business owners/man- agers where every respondent was asked to give data on their businesses and insightful information on innovation activities, and it is relevant to marketing per- formance of distinct firms. The study was limited to Greater Accra (Accra) and Ashanti (Kumasi) Regions of Ghana with the highest concentration of SMEs. A convenience sample was used to select 500 business owners/managers from SME service sectors (hospitality, beauty, transportation, and banking service). This ap- proach aligns with the previous study by Makanyeza and Dzvuke (2015)) within which an individual was selected to fill out the questionnaires for their companies. The National Board for Small Scale Industries’ database was used to obtain the relevant information from the entrepreneurs. The questionnaires were tested, and the final adjustment was made to represent the credibility of the instruments used before it was administered to the respondents. The questionnaires were moderated by a group of two researchers in the field of SMEs and eight selected experienced business owners/managers of SMEs. Consequentially, five investigative assistants were engaged and trained to help with the administering of the study question- naires to respondents. In all, 87.4% of the total questionnaires administered were returned representing 437 respondents. All the measures of innovation, transformational leadership, and marketing performance were intertwined in sequence to scale back the problem of common method variance (CMV). Further, the participants were assured of information secrecy of the data provided. Current studies have used this method in data collection to help reduce CMV problems (Acquaah and Agyapong, 2015).

In the study, the Baltic Sea region entrepreneurs have been asked to specify a kind and a degree of intensity of innovation changes implemented in their companies. It turns out that marketing and product innovations are most frequent. Moreover, an innovation climate based on openness in organization culture in these companies has proved to be an important factor in innovation implementation in the majority of the analyzed SMEs. SMEs in general have a bad opinion about the innovation climate in the country in which they operate. A difficult access to financing innovation activities by financial institutions is a common problem with building a friendly innovation climate in all the analyzed countries. Major problems which SMEs struggle with in innovation implementation are: lack of financial resources, complicated legal procedures, and a deficiency of adequately qualified staff.

This paper presents a novel empirical study of innovation practices of U.S. com- panies and their relation to productivity levels using new business micro data from the Business Research and Development and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) for the years 2008-2011. The paper follows the work of Frenz and Lambert, who use factor analysis to reduce a set of inputs and outputs of innovation activities into four latent unob- served innovation modes or practices for OECD countries using Community Innovation Surveys (CIS). Patterns obtained with BRDIS data are very similar to those found by those authors in some OECD countries. Companies are grouped according to their scores across the four factors to see that in large, small and medium companies more than one mode of innovation practices prevails. The next step in the analysis links dif- ferent types of innovation practices to levels of productivity using regression analysis. The four innovation modes have a statistically significant positive relation with the level of productivity, other things constant. The paper demonstrates the possibility of taking into account the multidimensionality of innovation without the use of composite indicators.

In recent years there has been a reassessment of the importance of knowledge in organizations. This has led to the need for knowledge management as a process for the acquisition, development, and use of knowledge, both tacitly and explicitly, for the achievement of business goals, the maintenance of sustainable competitive advantage, and innovation. The aim of this paper is to analyze knowledge management in companies involved in innovation activities in the state of Yucatán, México, through a quantitative, descriptive, non-experimental study, which was conducted by means of a survey given to a sample of 73 managers of these companies. The results show that, in these companies, knowledge management is at a highly-developed stage. The storage and application practices are those which companies have worked harder, whereas protection and acquisition of knowledge have received less attention. They have focused on storing information that represents valuable knowledge and applying it, mainly for the improvement everyday tasks that contribute to streamline processes and redesign of products and/or services.

Second, the findings presented here suggest management perceptions of innovation activities, as well as the job design, have an interplay which can influence the success of the activities. In many of the cases examined, time away from the phones was seen as a waste of time by management. In contrast these findings also show that for frontline employees time away from the phones had a positive impact on their perceptions of job quality, so there is a tension between management beliefs and the actual experiences of employees. The findings also show for EDI or HII to work then management cannot simply play lip service to the concepts. Management practices which use high involvement activities to alleviate the stresses associated with the Taylorised job design and do not value the ideas put forward by employees narrow the scope of the ideas. Bessant (2003) reflects back to the specialisation of tasks, where disconnection between hand and brain took place. Management were the actors with permission to innovate and improve i.e. the ‘thinkers’, whereas the workers did what they were told i.e. the ‘doers’. Thus, the findings of this research confirm that there are still workers in Taylorised jobs where they are more likely to have their contributions marginalised due to this split in thinking.