The innovation profiles of outstanding companies in Taiwan

Abstract

In this new century, people all realize how important innovation plays on competitiveness and pay most attention to capture it. In 1990s, European academia built up consensus on the definition and measurement of innovation and promoted the Community Innovation Surveys (CIS) in several western countries to capture the firm-level data about innovation. However, different from most innovation surveys which mainly try to gather the whole innovation picture in some industry or country, we outline the specific innovation profiles of outstanding companies to offer benchmark effect in this study. Based on the most updated CIS4 questionnaire, this study chose the nominated companies of Taiwan Industrial Technology Advancement Awards as samples and total 61 responses were collected. The results show that these outstanding companies pursue an obviously higher frequency in adopting multiple innovations. Organizational, marketing and strategic innovations also bring significant benefits on performance. On the other side, when these outstanding companies urge to enhance their innovation capability, they choose to invest R&D by themselves and centralize in Taiwan instead of cooperating with outside resources. Internationalization and open innovation are contemporary world-trends. It might be a warning for Taiwan government and industry to note.