The aim of this Special Issue will be a contribution to understanding the challenges faced by Latin American companies to innovate. The proposal is to gather high quality articles, which are the result of rigorous research and that provide knowledge on the challenges and persistences of the innovative behavior of Ibero-American firms.
We assume a plural methodological and theoretical approach that seeks to encourage the submission of high quality research papers from the most diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks.
Guest Editor
Dr. Alejandro Bello-Pintado; Teresa Garcia-Marco. Universidad Pública de Navarra. Carlos Bianchi, Instituto de Economía, Universidad de la República, Uruguay.
Topic
Firm’s Innovative behavior and performance have become a central topic in economics and management research studies during the last two decades. A huge amount of academic articles have shed light on the functioning of innovation processes, its drivers and constraints, with the premise that innovation is crucial for survival and business success, for the economy and the society as a whole (Laursen and Salter, 2014; Bogers, Foss and Lyngsie, 2018).
The research on firm’s innovation is mostly focused on western industrial economics or in Asian fast growth countries. However, some high quality researches have shown the particular features that affect innovation in Latin American firms. They show the persistence of some problems as low levels of productivity (Aboal and Tascir 2018) and the emergence of new challenges related to the skill biased effect of innovation in employment (Zuniga and Crespi 2013) or the strong concentration of innovation activities in “buy” strategies, mainly related to enhancing competitiveness activities through the acquisition of capital goods (Frank et al 2016; Goedhuys and Veugelers 2012). In addition, it has been stated the emergence of new challenges for Ibero-American organizations related to the skill biased effect of innovation in formal employment (Zuniga and Crespi 2013; Robert et al. 2010) and how it affects self-employment opportunities in a region characterized by a large informal sector (Hall et al. 2012).
The recent expansion of the innovation policies in Latin America has stablished new debates among scholars. The understanding of the specific features of the region and what effects have the recent policies in the firm behavior is currently object of different studies from several perspectives (e.g. Crespi, et al. 2016; Rocha 2015). Actually, one of the main challenges for research on firms’ innovation is the disconnection between innovation and the firms’ financial performance in Ibero-America, and to what extent the recent policy efforts have impacted in firms’ innovation patterns (Santos et al 2014; Cassoni and Ramada-Sarasola 2012)
This especial issue aims to contribute to the current literature on innovation by studying the changes and persistence of the firm’s innovation in Iberoamerican countries. The objective is to compile high quality new research results in a thematic and methodological pluralistic view of innovation behavior, offering a valuable synthesis that may serve Iberoramerican researchers, managers and policy makers, as well as for out of region researchers interested in the topic and peculiarities of innovation behavior in Iberoamerica.
This issue proposes to address a number of trend topics in firms’ innovation studies from different theoretical and methodological frameworks. Examples of research questions of contributions to the special issue include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Should Ibero-American firms make or buy innovations? What implication does it have for Ibero-American firms?
• Open innovation and firm performance: How does collaboration (breadth and depth) affect innovation performance? Are there patterns of collaboration between different actors?
• Drivers of innovation in Ibero-American countries: The role of technological sector and the firm size.
• What hamper innovation in Ibero-American firms? Is there evidence of complementary effects?
• Have the public policies affected the traditional pattern of innovation in the Ibero-American firms?
• What does the innovation system and infrastructure for innovation looks like? How do innovators interact with their systems? How does the innovation system for innovation links with entrepreneurship in Ibero-America?
• The human side of open innovation. Organizational structures; design of team incentives; the relationship between diversity of team groups and innovation performance.
• How should we measure the absorptive capabilities of the Ibero-American firms?
• Does innovation affect firm’s productivity in Ibero-American firms?
Submission Process
The submission process follows three steps:
Step 1- Manuscript should be submitted through ScholarOne Manuscripts page of Management Research (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mrjiam). Do not forget to select this special issue once you login into the system.
The manuscripts of a maximum of 8000 words should be posted no later than November 30th, 2018.
Step 2 – After the blind review recommendations, the guest editor will announce acceptance / rejection decisions by January 31st, 2018.
Step 3 – Authors of accepted papers will have until March 31st, 2019 to submit their manuscripts incorporating the reviewers’ suggestions.
Expected publication of accepted papers will be in the second half of 2019.
