نوآوری منطقه ای و عملکرد شرکت Regional innovation and firm performance

1. Introduction Personal growth consultants quip, “if you’re the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.” This colloquialism recognizes there is much to be learned from others, and the quote serves to prove the point that knowledge is shared and adapted through social interaction. Social interaction and collaborative “cultures of improvement” within firms breed innovation; it is reasonable to expect that creative cultures in communities further enhance firm performance within those communities. Existing research, including Swan, Newell, Scarbrough, and Hislop (1999) examination of network communities and their subsequent argument for community-based models of knowledge management, along with the large literature on firm clustering, provide evidence of communal benefits. However, they do not address the spillover effects of innovative cultures in a cross-industry geographic context. How might the innovative capacity of a community be measured? And how important is community-level “innovativeness” to firm performance? Those questions are considered in the following pages. The analysis below employs measures of innovation and engagement, at the county level in the US, to frame the relationship between innovation levels in a region and the performance of publicly traded firms within that area. The innovation measures reflect the “innovative capacities” of the region, the engagement index represents the opportunity for ideas to cross between firms, and financial data on publiclytraded firms in the region proxy for firm performance. In theory, an innovative community should contribute to improved firm performance, reinvestment, additional innovation, and continued growth for both the firm and the community – a virtuous cycle. Our results suggest that inventive activity within a county is positively related to revenue and profit growth while technical creativity is associated with process improvement and net income growth. Finally, the opportunity to collaborate and interact socially within a community is positively associated with firm performance but with only weak statistical significance for the publicly traded firms in the sample.