How a Smart Follower Becomes a Top Performer: An Institutional Innovation Perspective on Competitive Advantage

Jacques Brook
Additional contact information
Jacques Brook: Maastricht School of Management, the Netherlands

No 2011/13, Working Papers from Maastricht School of Management

Abstract: The competitive advantage literature has tended to establish a strong relation between innovation leadership and high firm performance. However, we found that this is not always true. Inspired by the failure of many firms to be leaders in innovation, many other firms prefer to orient their corporate innovation strategy towards being a smart follower. Here their objective is to reduce the risks of innovations and to achieve a sustained competitive advantage. Smart followers move beyond the traditional notion of follower that focuses on the decision of not becoming a leader in particular technology domain and how to gain a cost advantage by learning from the leader. This paper discusses an institutional innovation framework based on a business system thinking approach. The objective is to assist the leadership in firms in synergizing capabilities in the interactions between the innovation dimensions. We found that firms that choose to be smart followers can become top performer if they pursue institutional innovation.

Keywords: Innovation Strategy; Institutional Innovation; Competitive advantage; Business model innovation; technology innovation; process innovation; service and product innovation; social and sustainable innovation; performance. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M12 M14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2011-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse, nep-ent, nep-ino and nep-knm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://web2.msm.nl/RePEc/msm/wpaper/MSM-WP2011-13.pdf First version, 2011 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:msm:wpaper:2011/13

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Maastricht School of Management Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maud de By (by@msm.nl this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).