Elsevier

Industrial Marketing Management

Volume 91, November 2020, Pages 64-81
Industrial Marketing Management

Research paper
Determinants of technological innovation success and failure: Does marketing innovation matter?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2020.08.015Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Innovation in product packaging and design is positively related to innovation success.

  • Innovation in promotion is negatively related to innovation success and it is positively related to innovation failure

  • Treating marketing innovations as similar innovations that lead to similar consequences could be misleading

Abstract

Innovation is attracting increasing attention from public authorities, enterprises, and academics. Although emerging evidence has indicated that marketing innovation should be regarded as critical as technological innovations for enhancing companies' competitiveness, few studies have considered this topic.

This study aims to address this gap by examining the role of marketing innovation in the relationship between technological innovation and innovation success and failure. This study analyses the 2010–2012 Community Innovation Survey sample of German enterprises by using a double hurdle model and a probit model with sample selection. The results show that when enterprises undertake a technological innovation, introducing a marketing innovation is observed not to play a significant role regarding innovation success and failure. Notably, when the four types of marketing innovations are disentangled in the analysis, new findings emerge. Innovation in product packaging and design is positively related to innovation success. Innovation in product promotion is negatively related to innovation success and positively related to probability of innovation failure. Academics are called to study the role of marketing innovation, regarding innovation success and failure, by devoting their attention to the level of each marketing innovation. Enterprises should then carefully consider which marketing innovation should be introduced.

Section snippets

Introduction and motivations

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of marketing innovation on innovation performance, namely, the failure of technological innovation projects (i.e. the abandoning of innovation activities) and success of enterprises' technological innovations. Our research stems from considering that the adoption of a technological innovation per se might not be sufficient to acquire competitiveness (Bloom & Van Reenen, 2007Edwards, Battisti, & Neely, 2004) and that the practice of launching not

Theoretical background and conceptual development

Innovation has been conceptualized as the adoption of an idea, behaviour, system, policy, programme, device, process, product, or service new to an organisation (Damanpour, 1992). Innovation is often divided into technological and nontechnological innovation. Technological innovation includes process and product innovations. Nontechnological innovation entails marketing and organisational innovations. Despite the substantial amount of literature focused on innovation, little attention has been

Data

The study employed the CIS 2010–2012 survey data1 with reference to Germany. This harmonized survey is run every two years in each EU member state, some EFTA countries, and EU candidate countries and data are usually released two and half years after the end of the survey reference period. The survey is deployed by each national statistics institute under the coordination of EUROSTAT and designed to provide

Descriptive statistics

Table 1 presents some descriptive statistics for our sample of 6248 German service and manufacturing enterprises comprising 4273 innovating enterprises and 1975 non-innovating enterprises.

The innovation success and failure are conditional on being an innovating enterprise. The average share of turnover related to new products among those 1994 innovative enterprises reporting values higher than zero is 23.69%. In the remainder of the analysis, the original sample size might further reduce

Econometric methodology

To investigate our research questions, we analysed the role of introducing marketing innovation on the failure of an innovation project and the success of technological innovation. In both cases, we started from a baseline model that links the specific outcome to the marketing innovation indicator and a set of k control variables. The focus was on innovative enterprises because only among them we can observe the measures of the success of technological innovation and of the failure of an

Empirical results

The estimated coefficients and marginal effects of both models, by considering the marketing innovation and its separated components, are presented in the following subsections. Section 6.1 analyses the determinants of the success of innovation and provides estimates of the average partial effects of each independent variable on the conditional expected value of y2i, SUCC given y2i, SUCC > 0 and y1i, INN > 0 (see Burke (2009) for more details). Section 6.2 analyses the determinants of

Discussion and conclusions

This paper has investigated the role of marketing innovation with reference to innovation performance and measured in terms of innovation failure and innovation success. The results reveal the complex role of marketing innovations in their relationship with innovation performance. Table 11 summarizes empirical support to the hypotheses.

The introduction of one marketing innovation, regardless the type, is not related to innovation success and failure. Specifically, the results, both from the

Disclaimer

The anonymous data of the Community Innovation Survey 2012 (CIS 2012) used in the analysis of this paper was provided by EUROSTAT. All results and conclusions are given by the authors and represent their opinion and not those of EUROSTAT, the European Commission or any of the national authorities whose data have been used. The responsibility for all conclusions drawn from the data lies entirely with the authors.

Declaration of Competing Interest

None.

Ida D'Attoma is a Senior Assistant Professor of Economic Statistics at the Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Bologna, Italy. She received her PhD in Statistical Methodology for Scientific Research from the University of Bologna. She is involved in scientific societies and committees. Since 2010, she is member of the American Evaluation Association and since 2016 she is member of the Italian Statistical Society. Her research mainly focuses on program evaluation methodology and

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    Ida D'Attoma is a Senior Assistant Professor of Economic Statistics at the Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Bologna, Italy. She received her PhD in Statistical Methodology for Scientific Research from the University of Bologna. She is involved in scientific societies and committees. Since 2010, she is member of the American Evaluation Association and since 2016 she is member of the Italian Statistical Society. Her research mainly focuses on program evaluation methodology and economics of innovation. Some her recent works investigates how innovation policies, innovation and/or internationalisation strategies affect firm performance. The author can be contacted at [email protected]

    Marco Ieva is an Assistant Professor in Marketing at the Department of Economics and Management, University of Parma, Italy. He is a member of the Italian Marketing Association, the Italian Management Association and the Academy of Marketing Science. His research interests are: retailing, customer experience, customer relationship management and marketing innovation. The author can be contacted at [email protected].

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