Blending Innovation Types in Order to Achieve International Competitiveness. Multi-country Approach

Abstract

The relationship between innovation and international competitiveness is the subject of many research studies. The aim of the paper is to examine the association between the introduction of product innovation individually and in pairs with process and marketing innovation and the exporting of enterprises from 13 European Union countries, mainly from Central and Eastern Europe. The study used anonymized micro data from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) for 2012-2014. Based on the sample of 98 809 enterprises, 14 models were built using path analysis with the Bonferroni correction, one for the whole sample and 13 for each of the country studied. The analysis indicates positive link between the introduction of product innovation on sales activity on foreign markets of the enterprises of the surveyed countries (measured by exporting), but only for Germany and Spain. Surprisingly, adding process or marketing innovation to product innovation in most of the cases has an adverse effect on exporting.