Treble Innovation Firms: opening innovation frontiers in manufacturing

Abstract

Manufacturing firms can develop three forms of innovation: product, process, and service. Previous research has mostly analysed service innovation in isolation, whilst this study aims at comparing profit position of firms adopting simultaneously all technological innovations (treble innovation firms). Based on the Resource-Based View (RBV) premises, we argue that treble innovation firms can build on innovation cross-fertilization to develop valuable, rare and inimitable resources that translates in to a higher profitability. Furthermore, consistently with RBV, we also expect treble innovation firms to benefit more from open innovation because they can save considerably more in internal R&D development whilst keeping a differentiated offer. We test our hypotheses on a random and representative survey to 423 Spanish manufacturing firms, for which 22% are treble innovators. Our results support our hypotheses. Hence, we find causal evidence supporting that treble innovation firms obtain supernormal profits. Our results also confirm that open innovation positively moderates the relationship between treble innovation firms and performance, but this moderation is significant only when internal R&D expenditures are low.