?
Absorptive capacity and innovative behaviour: evidence from Russian manufacturing firms
The study aims to determine the connection between absorptive capacity and innovative behaviour. We analyzed firms' innovation processes and revealed the connection with their absorptive capacity at a regional level. The innovation process decomposition into sub-processes for the analysis of regional innovation processes was used in the study. For that aim, three types of innovation products were specified depending on their market and technological novelty level. Each of the types of innovation product bears the result of some innovation process implementation. For the analysis of the connection between companies' innovation process and absorptive capacity, two types of realized absorptive capacity to technological adoption from abroad will be highlighted. That adoption can take place either in disembodied or in embodied forms. The analysis uncovers that it is possible to reach large-scale innovative products with high market and technological novelty when firms intensively invest in R&D and participate in global technologies transfer, primarily in disembodied forms. The firms' ability of international technological knowledge absorption is the key factor to the innovation process. This is because most industries in these countries do not reach the level of technology of countries on the stage based on their innovations. Furthermore, the processes of innovation creation based on in-house R&D, which are performed by the firms studied, do not provide any significant contribution to the innovation process structure of the considered regions. If the regional industry's development level is relatively high but lags behind the international technological level, the scaled innovation creation processes are based on the firms' capability of the imported technologies adoption. If the companies' absorptive capacity is not large enough to transfer technological knowledge from abroad, the strategies of modifying and imitating new-to-firm products prevail in the market.
In book
