Do Large Firms Pursue More Process Innovation? A Case of Canadian Manufacturing Industries

We test the Cohen & Klepper cost-spreading process share hypotheses using unique data from two national innovation surveys (2009 and 2012). To our knowledge, no other study has the same combination as our dataset, in terms of robust data from a mandatory survey, large sample size, diverse measures for innovation output, and no sample selection bias. We use two direct measures of innovation to test the CK hypothesis: R&D expenditure and the number of innovations. An outcome variable that counts the number of innovations can be easier for respondents to recall from memory and they may reflect the firm’s activities more accurately. Using direct measures of innovation eliminates three forms of bias emanating from patents. Our results show that the CK hypotheses can be supported with the aggregated sample, but the results are weak for separate industries. The count-based process share provides statistically superior results to the expenditure-based process share

The Joint Strike Fighter / F-35 Program: A Canadian Technology Policy Perspective

The Canadian F-35 procurement represents the largest peacetime acquisition of new aircraft for Canadian forces since the Korean War. Securing industrial benefits from military procurement is essential for advanced industrialized nations, and it has long been Canadian industrial policy to do so. For the CF-18 program, “offset” contracts were negotiated, valued at 2.7 billion Canadian dollars (CAD) or 110 percent of the worth of the initial contract

E-banking and consumer debt

Canadian consumers have a debt problem and averaged a nationwide debt-to-income ratio of 1.654 in 2016. Based on current research, it is unclear whether e-banking has a positive or negative impact on this ratio. This paper hypothesises that e-banking increases consumer access to capital, and - using Canadian nationwide survey data - discovers that e-banking enhances the consumer's ability to access debt, thus leading to an increase of the debt-to-income ratio by two dollars more for every dollar earned. We suspect that the higher willingness to pay, along with preferring to be rejected for a loan via a web portal, leads to customers using e-banking to request loans via an e-banking portal as opposed to going to the bank. Concluding, this paper recommends an increase in government monitoring of the relationship between e-banking and personal debt

Mobile commerce and device specific perceived risk

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Electronic Commerce Research. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-015-9204-5This study examines the role of perceived risk and access device type on consumers’ on-line purchase decisions. We use a two-step hurdle approach to estimate consumer behavior. In the first step, the decision of whether to engage in eCommerce is estimated and in the second step, how many orders to place is estimated. We use a large multi-year survey sample of households from Canada’s national statistical agency—Statistics Canada. The sample size is such that we are able to conduct sub-sample analysis of PC-only users, mobile-only users, and other-users. We show that online security and price significantly influence mobile eCommerce. We also show that there is a statistically significant difference in the intensity of eCommerce engagement across device type and consumer risk type (high/low). One of our main findings is that perceived risk affects purchase decisions for mobile users more than PC users, however additional comparisons are carried out with our analysis

COMPLEMENTARITIES BETWEEN ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGIES AND INNOVATION

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether organizational strategies in various manufacturing industries are complementary with innovation. In particular, our interest is to discover which organizational strategies are complementary with major innovations (world-first and Canada-first). Knowledge of complementarity should pave the way for creating sustainable competitive advantage because the use of a complex strategy may be difficult to imitate. In other words, competitive advantage increases as the complexity of the strategy increases (i.e. because the number of strategy combinations follows a power law), which acts as a barrier to potential imitators (Rivkin, J.W. (2000) Imitation of Complex Strategies. Management Science, 46(6), 824—844.). Because of the static nature of our results (productivity and profit are for 1997), their interpretation can only be tentative. Thus, our research is really a first step along the road to understanding the (potential) importance of complementarities among firm strategies. Caveats aside, managers may want to compare their own firm’s emphasis on particular strategies against what is empirically determined to be complementary with innovation and high- performance within their industry. The frequency of complementary pairs that involve innovation range from 40 to 50% depending on whether we are talking about profit, productivity, or strategies. This result is important — as it means that innovation outcomes are statistically significant for both increased productivity and increased profit. Furthermore, innovation was found to be complementary with many organizational strategies. The complementary strategies across industries were quite different, but this was expected to occur. Keywords: Innovation; Strategy; Complementarity; Supermodular; Submodular JEL Classification: 031; L25; L6

Innovation quality and manufacturing firms' performance in Canada

The overall objective of this paper was to determine the impact of producing a world-first innovation, a Canada-first innovation and a first-to-the firm innovation on firms' economic performance (employment, labour productivity, market share and total value added). The study used unique data from Statistics Canada's 1999 Survey of Innovation that was linked to the 1997 Annual Survey of Manufactures. Three hypotheses were tested: that innovative firms (firm-first, Canada-first, world-first) should have higher performance (in terms of the performance measures that are defined in the next section) than non-innovative firms; that the dichotomous innovation variables should be statistically different from zero in the multivariate analysis; that the estimated coefficients in the performance regressions should be greater for world-first innovations compared to firm-first innovations. In the regressions world-first innovators had higher employment and market share offering support for the first hypothesis, while the results for labour productivity and total value added were not statistically significant. With regard to hypothesis two, the multivariate results were somewhat mixed since the world-first innovator was significant in two performance equations. Hypothesis three was confirmed since in all cases the ordering on coefficient size for the performance variables was world, Canada, and firm (with world being the largest and firm being the smallest).World-first innovations, Firm performance, Canadian manufacturing industries,

Essays on Organizational Form and Function in Agricultural Production Alliances

161 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998.This dissertation examines three firm-level issues related to the industrialization of agriculture. The first issue involves the conceptual choice of organizational form for industrialized swine production. Using models derived from various theories of the firm an integrated organizational form is shown to be more efficient in the long run relative to network (alliance) production. Secondly, system dynamics models are used to model different organizational forms. The dynamic empirical models demonstrate that properly structured networks may be competitive with integrated operations as well as offering producers a viable alternative to contract production. Thirdly, it is shown that organizational function is particularly important in terms of planning for and managing both committed and uncommitted slack resources in a network of swine production firms.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Essays on Organizational Form and Function in Agricultural Production Alliances

161 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998.This dissertation examines three firm-level issues related to the industrialization of agriculture. The first issue involves the conceptual choice of organizational form for industrialized swine production. Using models derived from various theories of the firm an integrated organizational form is shown to be more efficient in the long run relative to network (alliance) production. Secondly, system dynamics models are used to model different organizational forms. The dynamic empirical models demonstrate that properly structured networks may be competitive with integrated operations as well as offering producers a viable alternative to contract production. Thirdly, it is shown that organizational function is particularly important in terms of planning for and managing both committed and uncommitted slack resources in a network of swine production firms.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Impact of intellectual capital on small-firm growth: a longitudinal study from Inc. 5000

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Small Enterprise Research on 2021-05-21, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/https://doi.org/10.1080/13215906.2021.1929431.We explore whether intellectual capital is a precursor to Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) growth. We use data from Inc. 5000 of fast-growing SMEs in the USA and match companies to patent applications. We use a zero-inflated negative binomial model corrected for endogeneity to account for many SMEs without intellectual capital. We find the marginal benefit from intellectual capital on SME growth, revenue, and the number of years on the Inc. 5000 list. Across industries, we find a 1% increase in intellectual capital results in a 3.6% increase in revenue growth. The results change by industry: in particular, IT Services, Software, and Telecommunications are the only sectors that have a positive relationship between intellectual capital and growth. Perhaps surprisingly, SMEs in the Business Services, Engineering, and Health industry sectors experience negative growth with an increase in intellectual capital

Start-up funding sources and biotechnology firm growth

Biotechnology is one of the world's fastest growing industries, expanding almost four times faster than the G-7 average for all sectors with global demand of US$50 billion in 2005. Biotechnology offers significant economic benefits, particularly in exports and job creation, as well as important health, safety and environmental benefits. Although it has the potential to be an important engine of economic development in the twenty-first century, its research-intensity and the associated long lead times have intensified the equity gap faced by all rapidly growing firms. As a result, there are concerns about start-up financing on growth and performance. Our results show that angel, venture and conventional capital have contributed significantly to R&D capital formation and sales growth. Conversely, the contribution of funding from government, IPO and alliance capital sources are unimportant for our sample of biotechnology firms. These are counter intuitive results for conventional capital's importance for firm growth rates. It was expected that venture capital would be most important; however, it may be that older firms with more mature products or products ready for market are chosen as bank customers. In that case, perhaps it makes sense that bank capital is correlated with higher growth rates.