Building small firm performance through intellectual capital development: Exploring innovation as the “black box”

By William C. McDowell, Whitney O. Peake, LeAnne Coder, Michael L. Harris. Journal of business research, 2018

231 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Innovation seems to be a fundamental requirement for the growth and sustainability of small businesses. While previous research revealed a strong correlation between intellectual capital and performance, the role of intellectual capital in facilitating the innovativeness and performance of a firm has not been thoroughly examined in the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) context. This study examines the role of innovativeness in the intellectual capital and organizational performance relationship using a sample of small firms. The results of a survey conducted on 460 small business owners indicate a positive relationship between two components of intellectual capital, human capital and organizational capital, and organizational performance. Further analysis finds that innovativeness partially mediates the relationship between intellectual capital and organizational performance. Our findings indicate that efficiently and effectively organized firms can leverage well skilled and innovative employees to achieve the best performance through innovation.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9909b380f6365f7d9f4df41d287ec347ff528e5d

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In Strategy and Management

1. Feng Liu
2. Weizheng Yu
3. Yue Shang
4. Jian Xu

Citations in the corpus

• Intellectual Capital, Technological Innovation and Firm Performance: Evidence from China’s Manufacturing Sector (2019, background): “[75] suggested that innovativeness mediates the link from human and organizational capital to small firm’s performance.”