Measuring innovative performance: is there an advantage in using multiple indicators?

By John Hagedoorn, Myriam Cloodt. 2003

1,546 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The innovative performance of companies has been studied quite extensively and for a long period of time. However, the results of many studies have not yet led to a generally accepted indicator of innovative performance or a common set of indicators. So far the variety in terms of constructs, measurements, samples, industries and countries has been substantial. This paper studies the innovative performance of a large international sample of nearly 1200 companies in four high-tech industries, using a variety of indicators. These indicators range from R&D inputs, patent counts and patent citations to new product announcements. The study establishes that a composite construct based on these four indicators clearly catches a latent variable ‘innovative performance’. However, our findings also suggest that the statistical overlap between these indicators is that strong that future research might also consider using any of these indicators to measure the innovative performance of companies in high-tech industries.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a02e7c8d113fac26c3f944b94b43095630a7e9e2

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In Economics and Econometrics

In Management of Technology and Innovation

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Citations in the corpus

External Linkages, R&D and Innovation Performance in US Business Services (2007, background): “Size is a standard question for almost all studies of innovation, whether for manufacturing or service (Shan et al., 1994; Tether, 1998; Antonelli, 2000; Antonelli et al., 2000; Grupp and Maital, 2000; Meeus and Oerlemans, 2000; Galende and de la Fuente, 2003; Hagedoorn and Cloodt, 2003; Swamidass, ”
The dynamic impact of innovative capability and inter-firm network on firm valuation: A longitudinal study of biotechnology start-ups (2010, background): “We define innovative capability as the ability to generate novel and useful knowledge or products (Hagedoorn and Cloodt, 2003; Lee et al., 2001).”
Agglomeration and Innovation (2014, neutral): “Is there a strong correlation among the various indicators? Are the findings using patents similar to those based on R&D expenditures or to findings based on new product announcement data? One possibility for future research is to develop a composite indicator based on two or three of the individual”
Competence and governance in strategic collaboration: The differential effect of network structure on the creation of core and non-core technology (2012, background): “Patents are, nevertheless, generally viewed as the single most appropriate measure of innovative performance at the company level (Ahuja and Katila, 2001; Hagedoorn and Cloodt, 2003; Hagedoorn and Duysters, 2002), in particular in a single industrial sector context (Ahuja and Katila, 2001; Cohen and”
Determinants of innovativeness in SMEs: disentangling core innovation and technology adoption capabilities (2017, background): “Thus, innovative performance is really a construct made up of the different forms of innovation carried out by the firm (Hagedoorn and Cloodt, 2003).”
When do incumbents learn from entrepreneurial ventures?: Corporate venture capital and investing firm innovation rates (2005, background): “There are a number of measures of a firm’s innovativeness adopted in the empirical literature (see Hagedoorn and Cloodt, 2003, for a recent review).”
The innovative performance of firms in heterogeneous environments: the interplay between external knowledge and internal absorptive capacities (2018, background): “…enterprises,3 thus capturing a typology of innovation that is substantially underestimated by alternative sources (e.g. patents statistics commonly used in existing studies to indicate innovative performance; see e.g. Ahuja and Katila, 2001; Hagedoorn and Cloodt, 2003; Gagliardi et al., 2016).”