Three essays on innovation and regional economic development
The first essay develops a typology that identifies the multiple pathways, functions and operations where innovation can occur in a firm's internal business cycle based upon the extant literature that includes both technological and non-technological activities. This is an important step toward developing a comprehensive strategy for a regional economy and provides a common platform for the discussion of innovation among academics and practitioners.
The typology adds to the existing knowledge of how innovation works in organizations by describing the pathways, business functions and operations in a firm's internal-business-process; the business strategies used to advance innovation to the market; and the market impact that innovation has in a regional economy.
The typology is enhanced by the different threads of literature--innovation, technology, organization and marketing. The integrated approach allows academics and practitioners to understand how and where innovation occurs in firms and lays the foundation for robust metrics of the behavioral relationship between variables under study. The result is a set of assessment tools that permits diagnostics of the firm, industry, market and region.
The second essay examines the relationship between innovation, emerging technologies, business firms' investment structure, and specialized types of private equity used to finance emerging technologies. A conceptual framework is developed for financial investment and a set of hypotheses tested for investment between Ohio and U.S. firms. Ohio firms take a different investing approach than U.S. firms when investing in a firm's stage of business development but are not significantly different when using specialized types of financing, investing in industry/technology niches, and investing in geographic markets.
The third essay explores the role of innovation in business firms. The essay examines the reasons firms invest in innovation and then test the difference in the innovation behavior of firms. Descriptive analysis is performed in differences in the way firms engage in innovation, their preferred means of pursuing product innovation, and the reasons for engaging in product innovation. Hypotheses tests on the influence of innovation on firms' financial performance follows, as do the tests on differences in firms' contribution to the regional economy. The t-tests of the difference in means in six dimensions of economic impact performance confirm that innovative small to mid-sized firms have greater impacts on their regional economies than do their non-innovative peers.
