Innovation Strategy And Business Performance Of Japanese Manufacturing Firms

Abstract

This paper presents the first exploration of survey data of innovation strategy and performance of over 10,000 Japanese manufacturers. Although the importance of technological activities among various kinds of firms' strategic variables is generally agreed in Japan, empirical studies of them are very rare. In this paper, I start with basic facts of firms' R&D activities such as size and sectoral distribution of R&D expenditure and the number of patent holding, and investigate inter-industry heterogeneity of innovation strategies including technology licensing. The second part of this paper is for addressing issues on the relationship between these innovative strategies and the productivity level of firm. This evaluation is done by the following two steps, comparison between R&D performers and non performers, then regression of productivity on R&D among R&D performers. Small, but some positive associations between them are found, especially in high-tech industries.