Innovation Orientation, Innovativeness and Innovation Succes
What a Difference a DV Makes ... The Impact of Conceptualizing the Dependent Variable in Innovation Succes Factor Studies (si 0207)
Autor: Rudolf Dömötör / Nikolaus Franke / Christoph Hienerth
Ausgabe: 2/2007

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Rudolf Dömötör is research assistant and doctoral candidate at the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Vienna University of Economics and BA (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien), Nordbergstr. 15, 1090 Vienna, E-Mail: rudolf.doemoetoer@wu-wien.ac.at  Web: http://www.e-and-i.org/	Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Franke is Director of the above mentioned Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He is also Director of the TU/WU Entrepreneurship Center, Academic Director of the MBA in Entrepreneurship and Innovation (Schumpeter Program) and leads the User Innovation Research Initiative Vienna. His research areas are user innovation, toolkits for user innovation, horizontal innovation networks, and more generally entrepreneurship, innovation management, and marketing. E-Mail: nikolaus.franke@wu-wien.ac.at Web: http://www.e-and-i.org/ http://www.userinnovation.at http://www.ecvienna.at/	Dr. Christoph Hienerth is Associate Professor at the Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy, Copenhagen Business School, Kilevej 14 A, 2000 Frederiksberg, and research partner at the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Vienna. His major research interest lies in the field of user innovation. E-Mail: ch.ivs@cbs.dk  Web: uk.cbs.dk/forskning_viden/  institutter_centre/institutter/ivs

 

Abstract

• The quest for the "success factors" that drive a company's innovation performance has attracted a great deal of attention among both practitioners and academics. The underlying assumption is that certain critical activities impact the innovation performance of the company or the project. However, the findings of success factor studies lack convergence. It has been speculated that this may be due to the fact that extant studies have used many different measures of the dependent variable "innovation performance". Our study is the first to analyze this issue systematically and empirically: we analyze the extent to which different conceptualizations of the dependent variable (a firm's innovation performance) lead to different innovation success factor patterns. In order to do so, we collected data from 234 German firms, including well-established success factors and six alternative measures of innovation performance. This allowed us to calculate whether or not success factors are robust to changes in the measurement of the dependent variable. We find that this is not the case: rather, the choice of the dependent variable makes a huge difference. From this, we draw important conclusions for future studies aiming to identify the success factors in companies' innovation performance.  

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