International Journal of Innovation Management

This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of the innovative profile in products, an analysis of which focuses on the type of product novelty and on the degree of complexity. Spanish ceramic tile producers' innovative profile was analysed by means of an empirical study employing LBIO indicator methodology. Results show that firms that have launched more new products, that is, firms with more experience in product innovation, have a greater capacity for developing novel and complex products.

Drawing upon data from a sample of 597 small manufacturing firms, the current paper hopes to contribute to the emerging body of empirical literature, which seeks to distinguish the characteristics of more and less innovative small firms. Importantly, in so doing, a definition of innovation is employed which, at least partially, resolves many of the difficulties associated with operationalising the relativity of "innovativeness" and which places the emphasis upon innovation as a commercial, rather than a technological, phenomenon. To this end, a number of noteworthy observations are apparent. In broad terms, the paper points to the limits of viewing innovation output as a simple function of the volume of inputs. In other words, capability appears to matter at least as much as capacity. Moreover, the findings place the means of improving innovativeness firmly within the ambit of executives and suggest that these are likely to involve internal strategising and the development of human and intellectual capital.

Although the U.K. has a common political system, there are distinct regional differences. These differences are reflected in the outcomes of U.K. Government attempts to devise and implement innovation strategy within all parts of the U.K. Northern Ireland's (NI) regional differences are increased by the province's peripheral location in relation to the rest of the U.K. The aim of this paper is to explore the outcomes of innovation strategy and implementation on an U.K. regional basis. Moreover, the paper seeks to examine the effects of location by comparing the NI results with the other U.K. regions. This paper's focus is on NI; however, the level of analysis is the U.K. This is extremely important as it provides comparative data in order to test whether or not NI does differ from other regions in terms of its level of innovation activity. Data from the Community Innovation Survey shows that NI has a significantly lower level of product innovation, together with the lowest level of novel product innovation and the lowest market share attributed to novel innovations compared to the rest of the U.K. In addition, NI has the fourth lowest level of process innovation (and the lowest level of novel process innovation) in the U.K. Overall, NI can be considered something of an outlier region with regard to product innovation.

Projects play key roles in many modern industries and firms. The management of these economic systems, project management, is continuously developed and considered to be at the core of competitive advantage. Traditional research on project management has, however, paid scant attention to the capabilities needed for firms that depend on projects in their business operations. Furthermore, traditional work on the capabilities and competence of the firm pays limited attention to the specific traits of project processes. In the present paper, project competence is considered to be one of three strategic competencies frequently observed in modern firms. We develop an overall model for the analysis of project competence. The proposed model identifies four building blocks of project competence, namely project generation, project organising, project leadership and teamwork. In an empirical study we elaborate on some empirical regularities in the operations of firms that to a large extent depend on projects. The companies studied are ABB, Ericsson, Skanska and Posten. We illustrate the possibilities of this model and show some variations between the companies. The article illustrates how the project competence framework might explain the differences among the competitiveness of firms.

Incremental technical innovation is one of the significant dynamic processes taking place in manufacturing firms. For this study, incremental technical innovation has been classified as material, operations, scale and product innovations and we contend that their source and efforts directed are different and therefore it is imperative to identify the predictors of each. Based on a field study of 83 manufacturing firms in India, the study has found that government policies, customer orientation and formalisation are the predictors of material innovations. Operational innovations are related to inter-functional coordination, process orientation, centralisation and annual demand of the product. Customer orientation and formalisation are the predictors of scale innovations. Finally, incremental product innovations are related to technology planning and R&D intensity.