The Impact of Organizational Innovativeness on Product-oriented innovativeness in Agro-industrial micro and small businesses

Abstract

By means of the Local Innovation Agents (LIA) Program, the Brazilian Micro and Small Business Support Service (SEBRAE) has conveyed innovation to Brazilian micro and small businesses (MSBs). Within this setting, this paper aims to analyze the impact of organizational innovativeness on product-oriented innovativeness in agroindustry small businesses. Regarding methodology, Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was employed in order to validate constructs and to analyze causal effects. The sample comprises secondary data from 249 agroindustry MSBs that participated in the LIA program between 2012 and 2014. Regarding results, the final models fulfills all constructs validation criteria and structural analysis indicated that both loading factors and path coefficients were statistically significant, besides presenting predictive relevance and explained variance (R²) of 57,9%. In sum, the results show that organizational innovativeness impacts positively product-oriented innovativeness, corroborating other studies that show the importance of organizational innovations.