engleski

Competitive position and its relationship to innovation

In this paper we consider competitive positioning of 91 leading Croatian companies and relate their competitive standing to their innovation activities and output. The paper is based on data collected in 2001/2002. We consider eight dimensions of competitive positioning and perform cluster analysis on leading companies. Contrary to our expectations that some firms are better at some dimensions while others are better at other dimensions, we find that the division runs uniformly along all dimensions. In other words, some firms are better at everything, while other firms are worse at everything. We investigate how more competitive firms differ from the less competitive firms in terms of innovation activities and output. We find that the more competitive firms are more innovative. They invest more in R&D, have more employees with graduate degrees, and are less bothered by problems related to financing of innovation activities. We find that more competitive firms are more self-reliant when it comes to sources of ideas for innovating. When investigating innovation goals, we do not discover much difference between the two groups of firms, except that more competitive firms are somewhat more interested in using their innovations to win new market segments in the EU. However, we see some significant discrepancies between more and less competitive firms when it comes to factors that influence firm’ s development. Namely, less competitive firms seem to have problems with cost and availability of capital. This indicates that lower innovative output may be caused by firm’ s strategic problems.

competition; innovation

nije evidentirano