دانلود رایگان مقاله مدیریت نوآوری تحت فشار رقابتی از تولیدکنندگان غیر رسمی

abstract

The existence of a large informal sector may be a factor constraining formal firms’ choices of innovation strategies in many developing countries. This paper addresses this issue and studies the impact on innovation of competition against firms in the informal sector. Using the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey data from a sample of African and Latin American countries, we find that the marginal impact of informality on innovation by formal firms decreases with the intensity of competitive pressure from informal firms, consistent with an inverted-U relationship between propensity to innovate and competitive pressure from firms in the informal sector. This pattern arises even after controlling for the number of competitors, suggesting that the pressure that informal firms exert on formal firms go beyond a mere increase in the number of competitors.

6. Discussion

Our results suggest that the environment in which the firm operates greatly conditions the strategies chosen by firms regarding the generation and perpetuation of a competitive advantage. Controlling for other firms characteristics that may be responsible for a firm’s choice of innovation as a competitive strategy and for the number of innovators that the firm faces, we have found that the presence of informal firms is in fact conditioning formal firms’ decisions to innovate. Therefore, managers must take into account the fact that the set of strategies that are available to them in order to create or sustain a competitive advantage is context-specific. In our sample, informal firms activities are a strong obstacle to formal firms innovations and current innovations fail to shield formal firms’ competitive. If we consider a scenario in which formal firms must continuously innovate to avoid imitation by informal firms, we find that if the initial level of differentiation is low enough, implying a strong competitive pressure from informal producers, formal firms are less likely to choose differentiation strategies to escape competition from informal firms, thus ending up in a low-differentiation equilibrium. Under these circumstances, existing formal firms innovations do not seem to be a viable source of competitive advantage.