Short-, Mid-, and Long-Term Effects of Innovation Activities : A Configurational Analysis on Continuity, Competence, and Cooperation

The constant generation of innovation is a major factor in explaining a firm’s long-term success. Accordingly, previous literatures have identified several organisational, processual, and cultural factors that enable firms to promote successful innovation. Although these success factors appear to be rather different, most of them revolve around continuity, competence, or cooperation. As little prior research has focused on the complexity and interdependence of these various interlinked theoretical concepts, we adopt a configurational and longitudinal approach to analyse the effect of continuity, competence, and cooperation on the innovation performance of a firm on short-, mid-, and long-term bases. Based on a longitudinal data set that captures the innovation behaviour of 220 firms from 2009 to 2015, we find that continuity is the basic requirement for constant innovation performance. In addition, cooperation is likely to be supportive of innovation performance in the short term, while competence supports innovation performance in the long term