Board Characteristics, Firm Characteristics, Technological Innovation and Manufacturing Firm Performance: Conceptual Paper

Abstract

This paper aims to study a potential interrelationship between board characteristics, firm characteristics, technological innovation, and firm performance in the manufacturing sector. The paper is a conceptual paper. It offers a brief review of the literature regarding on these four variables. This study intends to employ a quantitative research approach in determining the determinants of firm performance. Several methods including online and offline material from article journals, books and industrial reports are used to collect and analyzed the literature. This study is grounded on RBV theory. The theoretical argument and literature findings indicate that viewing the firm performance from the perspective of internal sources by incorporating the three determinants, which include board characteristics, firm characteristics, and technological innovation, has the potential to improve manufacturing firm performance. This study reveals that there have been very limited studies have combined the three internal determinants of firm performance such as board characteristics, firm characteristics, and technological innovation on firm performance. As a result of focusing on internal firm resources, the framework will provide a greater emphasis on strategic sources that the firm owns and can fully utilize in order to improve the Malaysian manufacturing firm performance. Therefore, this warrants more investigation, and future studies are needed to further analyze the proposed framework.