Abstract
The innovation capability of a company is considered the determinant of its competitiveness in the long-term. Therefore, it is of increasing importance to understand the critical variable behind a firm’s innovation capability. The paper explores these issues and contributes to the research on the factors that drive a company’s innovation capability. The aim of the paper is to identify which factors determine the innovation capability of manufacturing enterprises operating in Poland. In the theoretical part, it provides an overview of recent contributions to the literature on a company’s innovation capability enhancers. The empirical contribution of the paper refers to recognising the relationship between the certain practices pursued by Polish manufacturing enterprises and their innovation capability measured by innovation output. Using a model for panel data, the study finds that that the factors driving innovation capability of manufacturing enterprises operating in Poland are the following: inter-organisational cooperation, hiring employees in research and development (R&D) activities as well as firms’ internal expenditures on R&D. The study is based on the data from publications of the Central Statistical Office of Poland, which contain information on the activities of manufacturing enterprises and reports presenting the results of research on the innovation capability of enterprises.
Highlights
In today’s highly complex and rapidly changing economic reality, a firm’s ability to innovate has become an imperative for survival and success
Enterprises that participated in innovation-oriented cluster cooperation as the share of manufacturing enterprises participating in innovation-oriented cooperation, in j NACE division, in the period t
The basic methods of estimating parameters in panel models are the estimator of fixed effects (FE) and the estimator of random effects (RE)
Summary
In today’s highly complex and rapidly changing economic reality, a firm’s ability to innovate has become an imperative for survival and success. The ability to innovate is said to be an attribute of the companies that aim to improve their competitive advantage while supporting sustainability in the long term [5,6]. It is said that business entities that aspire to remain competitive in today’s economy for a long time need to treat the development of their ability to innovate as a philosophy of continuous improvement towards sustainability [8]. The authors argue that technological innovation capability is a significant source of a company’s competitive advantage and sustainability in the long term [7]. Wonglimpiyarat, while discussing innovation capability nature, focuses on a firm’s ability to make major modifications to improve existing technologies or create completely new ones [28]. Developing a firm’s innovation capability may include such activities as internal research and development, external research and development, provision of modern machinery, equipment, computer hardware and software to produce new or significantly improved products and processes, obtaining the opinions of external experts, training for innovation, activities leading to innovation in the market and other activities such as software testing, software development, etc. [30,31]
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