Innovationseffizienz und Unternehmenserfolg

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Type and Duration

FFF-Förderprojekt, January 2019 until December 2019 (finished)

Coordinator

Institute for Entrepreneurship

Main Research

Growth and Complexity

Field of Research

Enterprise

Description

Summary after project end

Since Schumpeter introduced his theories about creative destruction and innovation, it has been believed that innovation is a major driver of growth and prosperity. At the firm level, innovation is seen as an input for a competitive advantage. Investments in innovation activities are usually limited by financial and resourceful constraints. A comprehensive measurement of innovation allows organizations to allocate resources, manage the innovation process appropriately and assess the outcome in terms of innovation performance. Measuring the efficiency of a firm's innovation process is difficult to assess, because of the required multiple input and output variables. A specific parametric production function of this process for different firms is not available in innovation management. However, by using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) it is possible to evaluate the efficiency of innovation processes of different firms. DEA is a non-parametric evaluation technique, which can calculate efficiency scores for input-output models of different firms. This consideration is the fundament of the reserach project on "Innovation and Company Success". In a first study we have been able to identify a set of so called company domains, which all effect innovation performance of a company. In addition to that, we used a bibliometric technique, to identify innovation metrics applicable fon our DEA model. One of the main problems in DEA efficiency calculation arises, it is either the access to innovation metrics of companies or to find the right combination of inputs and output metrics in DEA innovation efficiency measurement. We have been able to derive a so called minimum data set for innovation efficiency measurement, which finally leads to the calculation of an innovation efficient frontier. All companies - cross industry - which lie on this innovation frontier, have the ability to transform innovation inputs in respective outputs in the most efficient way. A nice side-effect of this innovation efficient frontier is the fact, that innovation efficient companies are character-ized by better financial or stock performance compared to benchmarks. And we have been able to prove patterns of innovation-efficient companies. One pattern is that innovation-efficient companies do not overre-act economic-up and downswings. This results leads to additionl reasearch topics. E.g. to the question if inno-vation efficient companies are more sustainable or not.

Principal Investigator

Sponsor

  • Forschungsförderungsfonds der Universität Liechtenstein