Organizational resilience: a comparative study between innovative and non-innovative companies based on the financial performance analysis

Abstract

Organizational resilience is defined as the ability and capacity of an organization to withstand unexpected changes, discontinuities and environmental risks. Innovation contributes to achieve resilience as it enables organizations to renew over time. Our aim in this article is to analyze the relationship between innovation and resilience from the financial performance analysis with EBITDA, ROE and ROA indicators. We investigated a total of 10 companies divided into two groups, where the first was a group of 5 open-capital companies listed in the ranking of the 50 most innovative companies in Brazil, and the second being a group of 5 open-capital companies not listed in the ranking. We performed an analysis in two stages: the first consisted in calculating the indexes selected in the four fiscal years - 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 - chosen by coinciding with a period after the 2008-2009 crisis; in the second stage, we compared the indexes of the two groups of companies in the four established periods. The results indicate that innovative companies are able to sustain higher financial results than those non-innovative companies. As a main contribution, our study provides a longitudinal comparative analysis, thus providing evidence on the financial performance of innovative enterprises.