Industry- and firm-specific factors of innovation novelty

This article investigates the underlying factors that might shape the firm’s choices with respect to degrees of innovation novelty. Using a sample of 2983 firms observed under the Portuguese Community Innovation Survey, we assess the relative relevance of a set of firm- and industry-specific factors in explaining firms’ choices about incremental or radical innovation. The results indicate that both the firm’s idiosyncratic historical factors giving rise to heterogeneous R&D capabilities and the industry context have power to shape the firm’s innovation choices, even though firm-specific factors appear to be more powerful. The estimated impacts on firm’s innovation novelty are, nonetheless, significantly moderated by the type of firm and industry.