Sustainable and Traditional Product Innovation without Scale and Experience, but Only for KIBS!

Esteban Lafuente, Yancy Vaillant and Juan Carlos Leiva
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Yancy Vaillant: Department of Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Toulouse Business School (TBS) 1 Place Alphonse Jourdain, 31068 Toulouse CEDEX 7, France
Juan Carlos Leiva: Business School, Costa Rica Institute of Technology (ITCR), 15th Street, 14th Avenue, Cartago 30101, Costa Rica

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 4, 1-18

Abstract: This study analyzes the ideal strategic trajectory for sustainable and traditional product innovation. Using a sample of 74 Costa Rican high-performance businesses for 2016, we employ fuzzy set analysis (qualitative comparative analysis) to evaluate how the development of sustainable and traditional product innovation strategies is conditioned by the business’ learning capabilities and entrepreneurial orientation in knowledge-intensive (KIBS) and non-knowledge-intensive businesses. The results indicate two ideal strategic configurations of product innovation. The first strategic configuration to reach maximum product innovation requires the presence of KIBS firms that have both an entrepreneurial and learning orientation, while the second configuration is specific to non-KIBS firms with greater firm size and age along with entrepreneurial and learning orientation. KIBS firms are found to leverage the knowledge-based and customer orientations that characterize their business model in order to compensate for the shortage of important organizational characteristics—which we link to liabilities or smallness and newness—required to achieve optimal sustainable and traditional product innovation.

Keywords: sustainable product innovation; traditional product innovation; KIBS businesses; organizational learning capabilities; entrepreneurial orientation; fuzzy set analysis; strategy type (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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