Industry clockspeed's impact on business innovation success factors

Abstract

PurposeThe literature prescribing important determinants of innovation success is grouped into four main areas encompassing strategic leadership, competitive intelligence, management of technology, and specific characteristics of the company's innovation process. Further, industry clockspeed has been considered to be a possible moderator for these determinants of innovation success. While these major areas of study may indeed be important to enhance company innovation and competitiveness, the existing literature on each area is not being shared by researchers in the other areas. That has led until now to the study of models relatively narrow in scope and primarily focused on the particular research area. This study aims to test these constructs as a set of determinants of innovation success and the possible moderating effect of industry clockspeed.Design/methodology/approachA field test using a mailed questionnaire to collect a relatively large sample has been used to test the proposed model. To eliminate possible multicollinearity among the independent variables, a multivariate regression analysis was used.FindingsThe results provide clear evidence about the importance of industry clockspeed as a moderator of the relationships between strategic leadership, competitive intelligence, management of technology, and specific characteristics of the company's innovation process with company success in business innovation. Also, the company's change process as defined here is equally important to low and high clockspeed industries for successfully implementing business innovations.Research limitation/implicationsDespite the relatively broad scope of the proposed model, other factors may also be important and should be included in future studies.Practical implicationsThe items used for measuring the main constructs provide further and more specific insights into how managers should go about developing these areas within their organizations.Originality/valueWhile the study is grounded in the literature of what until now have been four separate areas of knowledge, it proposed an integrated model for these areas important to business innovation, and empirically tested the model.