Recessionary period activities in forest sector firms: Impacts on innovativeness

Eric Hansen, Casper Claudi Rasmussen and Erlend Nybakk

Journal of Forest Economics, 2017, vol. 28, issue C, 80-86

Abstract: The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) provides a unique setting to study innovativeness and customer orientation in forest sector firms. Considerable research has focused generally on innovativeness in forest sector firms, but little attention has been given to the actions of firms to the chaotic market environment during the GFC. Our objective is to clarify how a customer orientation and the practice of developing new markets during a market downturn results in enhanced knowledge-based resources, manifested as increased innovativeness. Our longitudinal design includes data representing 2012 and 2015 from 89, US-based forest sector firms. Responding firms are more focused on process than product innovativeness. During the GFC, responding firms concentrated more on foreign market development than on domestic market development. Firms with a stronger customer orientation in response to the GFC realized higher innovativeness post-GFC. Also, firms actively developing new foreign markets in response to the GFC realized higher process innovativeness. Our results support a stronger customer focus for forest sector firms as it translates to increased innovativeness and potentially improved product development. In addition, allocating resources to foreign market development during financial downturns can be a strategy to build innovativeness.

Keywords: Customer orientation; Product innovativeness; Process innovativeness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1104689917300193
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:foreco:v:28:y:2017:i:c:p:80-86

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/701775/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 701775/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.jfe.2017.06.004

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Forest Economics is currently edited by P. Gong and R. Brännlund

More articles in Journal of Forest Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().