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Innovation has been acknowledged as the key for modern industries. However, the construction industry is criticised for being poor in innovation performance compared to other industry sectors. Large construction firms are the main contributor to technological innovation in the construction industry, but the driving process of their technological innovation has not yet been fully investigated in previous studies. The purpose of this paper is to provide quantitative analysis of the technological innovation driving process of large construction firms.

An extended crépon, duguet and mairesse (CDM) model has been developed to analyse the key influencing factors for technological innovation in construction firms. The sample data are selected from the world’s largest construction market, China, and include 129 listed construction firms.

The results show significant positive correlation between R&D investment and innovation output and also between innovation output and performance. The effect of influencing factors on the R&D investment, innovation output and performance are also revealed by the empirical study. The underlying reasons are discussed and suggestions are given for the construction industry to improve the technological innovation capacity of construction firms.

This research contributes to the literature of construction innovation and benefits practitioners by providing a quantitative approach to demonstrate the driving process of innovation in construction firms.

This study aims to excavate the external and internal driving factors of enterprise digital innovation and further condense the function mechanisms and response actions of the innovation process as well as the final innovation outcomes to propose the theoretical framework of enterprise digital innovation with the logic thread of “innovation motivation–innovation process–innovation result”.

Based on the digital background and integrating previous case studies on enterprise digital innovation, this study uses qualitative meta-analysis to explore the motivations of enterprise digital innovation, the function mechanisms and response actions of innovation process as well as the innovation outcomes.

This study finds that digitally transformed enterprises driven by external environmental factors and internal organizational factors follow the logic of adaptive and open innovation, and finally accomplish the digital innovation results of products, services, processes, business models, technology and social responsibility through the response actions of adaptation and interaction mechanisms.

In the digital economy era, digital innovation has become the key strategic choice for enterprise transformation, upgrading and innovation. Why and how enterprises realize digital innovation with the help of emerging digital technology remain to be explored. This study has important theoretical significance and practical value for the digital innovation and transformation of enterprises under the digital background.

This study aims to suggest directions for innovation-driving paths for sustainable growth through an in-depth case analysis of a successful Internet of Things (IoT) in small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) in South Korea. IoT is expected to play a significant role in the future industry 4.0 platform. Yet, little is known about how SMEs in the IoT industry (IoT-SMEs hereafter) pursue innovation in alignment with attributes inherent in the IoT.

This study addresses relatively unexplored key research questions on innovation strategies of IoT-SMEs. To do so, we employ an exploratory research methodology, along with an extensive review of the literature in the areas of the IoT, SMEs innovation and sustainable growth strategy. Specifically, we conduct intensive individual interviews to find IoT inherent innovation attributes and a case study to explore the process of linking these attributes to innovation-driving paths.

The analysis results reveal that there exist disruptive and open innovation attributes in the IoT industry that enable IoT-SMEs to enhance their structure and process related capabilities, to create business models for products and services and to collaborate with external parties in marketing to enter the market. We excavate practical insights into driving innovation based on IoT attributes and suggest enabling paths for pursuing innovation and entering overseas markets for IoT-SMEs.

This study investigates an underexplored significant area of research on the relationship between IoT attributes and innovation paths. The findings provide profound theoretical and practical implications. To the best of the author’s knowledge, it is the first attempt to link disruptive and open IoT attributes to innovation paths of IoT-SMEs. The results provide directions for pursuing effective innovation in responding to the IoT market for sustainable growth.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the pivotal role of environmental innovations in driving sustainability practices within medium and large manufacturing firms operating in Uganda.

Using a cross-sectional and quantitative methodology, data were collected through a questionnaire survey involving 208 manufacturing companies. The smart partial least squares path modelling technique was used for the analysis.

The analysis unveils significant and positive associations. Specifically, product innovation exhibits a robust and affirmative relationship with sustainability practices. Similarly, the correlation between process innovation and sustainability practices emerges as statistically significant. Moreover, the findings underscore the noteworthy and constructive predictive influence of environmental innovation on sustainability practices.

These empirical results present substantial implications for theoretical frameworks and practical applications. From a policy perspective, the findings emphasise the importance of incentivising eco product and eco process innovations as potential drivers of eco-friendly practices. On the managerial front, strategic resource allocation and the adoption of integrated environmental innovation strategies are advocated, with the ultimate goal of enhancing sustainable business approaches within Uganda’s manufacturing subsector.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study represents the inaugural attempt to investigate the role of environmental innovations in elucidating sustainability practices within a least developed country. Notably, while all dimensions demonstrate significance, it is noteworthy that product innovation emerges as the more substantial contributor to the promotion of sustainability practices.

Enterprises in the digital context attach importance to the participation of heterogeneous subjects in co-creation activities. As the core source of organizational innovation, employees are bound to assume responsibilities or provide role value in the process of digital innovation. While employee-driven digital innovation frameworks are being explored, together with research on employee innovation behavior mostly focusing on the “net effect” of single-level variables on outcomes.

Following the interaction logic of employee level and organizational level, this study applies ability, motivation and opportunity (AMO) theory and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to explore the influence of various digitization related factors' conditional configuration on employees' digital innovation behavior.

The results indicate that type of “self-motivation with multiple supports”, “organization-driven with digital oriented” and “digital-driven with ambidextrous complementary” constitute the configuration that drives high digital innovation behavior, while type of “cognitive deficit with environmental slack” and “fuzzy motivation with opportunity misapplication” constitute the configuration that drives nonhigh digital innovation behavior.

This conclusion enriches the theoretical research on digital innovation that regards individuals as action potentials and provides important guidance for how to cultivate and activate employees' digital innovation behaviors in management practice.

The aim of this study is to propose and test a model of innovation process management and to clarify the managerial strategies required to achieve it in Japanese enterprises.

The authors conducted empirical tests of the model using the data from the questionnaire surveys of Japanese companies, and an illustrative case study.

It was found that there was a high likelihood that the IP of Japanese companies thought to have had success with innovation matched the proposed model. The support for the model from the Japanese data is sufficiently strong so as to suggest that certain managerial factors should generally be implemented in order to succeed with innovation. The authors then conducted a case study on a notably prominent Japanese company, Toyota, interviewing senior executives both in Japan and Australia. This was done in order to further verify and enrich the findings of the model development and the empirical survey study. The authors found specific practices and capabilities that were statistically significant in Japan's manufacturing companies in general, which were also deeply engrained within Toyota in particular. The importance of structured process in Toyota in particular and generally in the Japanese manufacturing sector was confirmed, comprising scanning, idea occurrence, strategy formulation, resource procurement, implementation and value creation.

This study is one of few that shows the particular approach used in Japanese manufacturing companies. That systematic approach led Japanese manufacturing companies to be at the forefront of innovation for three decades from 1975, and able to successfully expand internationally.

The purpose of this paper is to define the factors of innovativeness in the context of employee involvement and study how these factors could be affected by an employee-driven innovation (EDI) process.

This study follows a quantitative approach through a survey. The survey data were collected from a case organisation, where employees designed an innovation manual in a participatory process to support their daily innovativeness.

According to the results, the EDI manual process can assist the organisation in developing their ideation and organising structures. The employees felt that their ideas were appreciated more after the innovation manual process. Understanding about innovation and innovativeness was also increased. In between two survey rounds, the focus of the most urgent development targets had shifted from internal idea management practices towards customer ideas, cooperation and appreciation of different ideas. This indicates that the internal innovation system has to work before it is reasonable to involve other stakeholders.

The study presents an empirical example of an employee-driven process in the context of public sector healthcare. It increases understanding about the importance of employee involvement in the innovation manual development process and how this process affects the factors of innovativeness.

Creativity is often referred to as a seedbed of innovation. As such it holds the key to better performance and the competitiveness of firms. To better understand how creativity influences birth and commercialization of innovations and productive efficiency of firms the paper investigates how hiring of employees with different creative skills impacts innovation process and productivity. The purpose of this paper is to determine the role of creativity in innovation behavior and productive efficiency of firms.

Theoretical framework of the paper rests on pillars of evolutionary, Schumpeterian and endogenous growth literature contributions to the economics of innovation. The multi-stage analytical framework is applied to examine contribution of creativity to the decision of firms to innovate, investment in innovation activities, commercialization of innovations and firm efficiency. The econometric techniques of generalized tobit and simultaneous equations framework are applied to confidential data from the UK Innovation Survey in 2010-2012 period.

The investigation broadens our understanding of factors and forces that shape innovation process and improve productive efficiency of firms. It provides empirical evidence on an impact of the effectiveness of innovation process on the productivity of firms. The results reveal that creative skills contribute to the generation of novel ideas and investment in research and development but the ability to meet customer requirements draws from other organizational skills such as marketing or organizational innovations. Differences are revealed among economic sectors with respect to the forces driving the innovation process.

Further research will be needed to investigate cross-country differences in management of creativity and its contribution to the innovation process and productivity. The limited availability of data on creativity and innovation activities of firms presents the most important limitation in this sense. The framework set by this paper can serve as direction for further investigations.

The results provide implications to managers regarding the management of innovation process. First, the study reveals how creative potential of employees can be optimally exploited in different stages of innovation process. Second, the research highlights number of other factors relevant in this process from the utilization of information, subsidies and the general management of human resources. Finally, the results suggest that sectoral heterogeneity should be taken into account in management of innovation activities of individual firms.

While the impact of creativity on innovation has been addressed previously, this paper is one of first attempts to examine the linkages between management of creativity, effectiveness of innovation process and productive efficiency of firms within a single framework. One of reasons for this is the fact that it relies on the confidential dataset of firms not easily accessible to researchers.

Innovation is an essential process for growth and well-being of organisations and society in general but is difficult to manage successfully. Through a better understanding of the innovation mindsets as established strategists use them in practice, this paper aims to improve firms’ success rates of innovation.

To examine how innovation processes play out in dynamic environments, the authors undertook a longitudinal two-year multi-case study in the high-tech sector.

Strategists in this study showed distinct phases in their successful innovation journey with three dominant mindsets of curiosity, creativity and clarity. The curiosity phase includes actions focused on discovering and understanding the implications and significance of an opportunity. The creativity phase includes actions focused on creating and testing a wide range of options. The clarity phase consists of actions focused on resourcing and implementing change.

In adopting this framework for use in the field, the authors recommend strategists take time for discovering and getting to core understanding in the curiosity phase. They should then take action by creating and actively testing a broad range of solution ideas in the creativity phase. Finally, organisations need to take care with clear direction and communication when resourcing and implementing in the clarity phase.

This novel framework which emerged from the longitudinal field research describes the mindsets of innovation and how these are used at different phases in the innovation process.

The purpose of this study is to identify the factors that contribute to the successful implementation and management of sustainable innovation in research-intensive sectors such as the life sciences industry.

The study was conducted through a combination of two methods. The first was qualitative interviews of 21 sustainability experts and leaders in the life sciences industry who were responsible for implementing sustainable innovation. They were selected through nonprobabilistic purposive sampling. The second method was thematic content analysis using the MAXQDA software.

The study identified that successful implementation of sustainable innovation in research-intensive firms begins with the alignment of the executive vision for sustainability with the business objectives of the research-intensive firm. Furthermore, implementation of sustainability practices is identified as a function of organizational reconfigurations that facilitate purposeful inflow and outflow of ideas and knowledge between internal firm resources and external stakeholders, anchored by the objectives of the research-intensive firm.

The study explicated factors only within life sciences industry based on qualitative interviews. The study offers scope for cross-sector quantitative evaluation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first studies to systematically delineate the underlying factors that govern successful implementation of sustainable innovation in research-intensive industries, through integration of the resource-based view and stakeholder theory and thereby provide a framework for research-intensive organizations to implement sustainable innovation practices.