Soft Ict and Innovation Performance: an Empirical Investigation

The limited number of previous empirical investigations of the effect of information and communication technologies (ICT) on innovation focus mainly on the ‘hard’ dimensions of ICT (i.e. firm’s ICT equipment). This paper presents an empirical investigation of the effect of five important ‘soft’ dimensions of ICT at firm level (ICT structure, personnel, skills, strategy, processes) on firm’s innovation performance (concerning both products/services and processes innovation). It is based on firm-level data collected through a survey of 271 Greek firms, which have been used for estimating regressions of product/service innovation and process innovation on measures of the hard ICT, the above five soft dimensions of ICT, and also four important ‘traditional’ innovation determinants identified from the long previous research in this area (demand expectation, price and non-price competition, market concentration). It is concluded that four of the examined soft dimensions of ICT (ICT personnel, skills, strategy and processes) have positive effects on firm’s innovation performance. Our results indicate that the soft dimensions of ICT at firm level are strong drivers of innovation, which increase considerably the positive contribution of ICT to firms’ innovation performance.