Revisiting incremental product innovations in the food-manufacturing industry: An empirical study on the effect of intellectual property rights

The highly competitive and mature food industry has long been process innovation-oriented while largely neglecting product/technological innovation. However, recent innovation debates have raised two issues. First, imitations of product innovations likely underestimate the value of innovation in this industry; second, exaggerations of new product development neglect incremental product innovations, which facilitate branding. Using intellectual property rights data as indicators of exclusive innovation outcomes, this study empirically examined these issues. The distinction of consumer communication channel-related designs from other industrial designs utilizing the advantage of the simple structure of foods has realized highly fitted proxies of distinc-tive innovation activities. Investigating the firm performance of 192 Japanese food manufactures between 2009 and 2013 revealed the dominance of incremental innova-tions in product packaging over other exclusive innovations. This study provides practi-cal insights regarding innovations for the industry and evidence of the effectiveness of consumer communication-related designs of patents, especially as novel innovation proxies.