Intellectual capital‐driven innovation: the influence of servitization degree

Abstract

While intellectual capital's (IC) impact on innovation has been well‐established, increasing understanding of related contingencies would yield great benefits to both research on and the practice of innovation and IC management. With the rise of the service economy, servitization degree – i.e., the degree of relevance of service provision compared with the delivery of manufactured goods – represents an important contingency, with significant potential to shed more light on and improve the understanding of the IC‐performance relationship in the context of research and development. This paper examines how servitization moderates IC's impact on innovation performance by testing related hypotheses on a sample of 180 Spanish companies through a statistical analysis conducted through structural equation modeling based on partial least squares. The results indicate that servitization moderates the relationship between internal and external relational capital and innovation in different ways: The moderation effect is negative for internal relational capital, but positive for external relational capital, i.e., more service‐oriented companies benefit from internal collaboration and coordination to a lesser extent in their innovation endeavors, while external stakeholder communication and networks are crucial for achieving a high rate of innovation performance. The findings help develop a more fine‐grained understanding of IC's role in innovation and related firm‐ and industry‐level contingencies, as well as increase the understanding of R&D ecosystem agents.