Innovation Orientation, Environment and Performance: A Comparison of U.S. and European Markets

Abstract

Much attention has been paid to the importance of innovation in ensuring the survival and growth of companies. For U.S. companies a key issue is to what extent findings for the U.S. market can be extrapolated to non-U.S. markets to provide a basis for designing innovation strategy. Similar innovation orientation types were identified in both markets using a sample of consumer businesses from the PIMS database. A number of similarities and differences in associated environments and performance levels were also identified. A major finding was that a high degree of product innovativeness leads to generally poor financial and market share performance in both markets but high rates of market share growth. Another major finding was that having pioneered in a market leads to effective performance. Results for the associated environments were more mixed in the sense that there was not a perfect correlation in the environments associated with the types in both markets.