The impact of business strategies and business conditions on innovation

This paper focuses on the factors that drive innovation activity by businesses. A survey of over 200 businesses in the Queensland road and bridge industry was undertaken in 2002 and respondents were asked to rate the importance of key elements of business strategy to business success and to identify key elements of their business conditions. The results were then correlated with two measures of innovativeness. Exploratory tests indicated that the most important business strategies involve ‘investing in R&D’ and ‘protecting intellectual property’, while the most important business condition to innovation success is ‘obtaining high quality external technical support’. The conclusions stress the importance of building inter-organisational relationships and effective business networking. In future research, the results will be interpreted more widely, by undertaking a comprehensive integrative analysis of emerging academic literature.