Persistence of innovation: Discriminating between types of innovation and sources of state dependence

Abstract

This paper advances current research on the persistence of innovation drawing on a panel data set constructed from three waves of the German part of the Community Innovation Survey covering the time span from 2002 to 2008 (i.e., CIS IV, CIS 2007, and CIS 2009). We explore persistence patterns for various types of innovation (i.e., organizational, product and process innovation) and allowing for the moderating impact of firm-level characteristics. We use the ascertained patterns of persistence to comparatively evaluate various sources (and underlying theoretical accounts) of state dependence.