The organizational practices of innovation and the performances of firms : an empirical investigation

On a weighted sample of more than 1500 firms from the French manufacturing industries, we explore the relation between individual organizational practices dedicated to innovation and the output of the process. 16 different organizational practices are identified dealing with the constraints or objective applied to employees. The belonging to a national and foreign group is also considered. Controlling for numerous variables usually included in econometric regressions at the individual level, the estimations are conducted on four different variables measuring performances: radical innovation, patent deposit, encountered failure, global innovation (process, product, commercial and design). The main finding is that the organization of innovation, for a firm within a sector, with a given innovative effort and public support, has often a significant impact on the productivity of innovation. The results give consistency to previous investigations trying to identify the organization “best practices” for innovation. However, this investigation underline the bias of the previous results that do not investigate the possible complementarities among the individual organizational practices. Clusters of organizational practices explain the main part of the model whereas a marginal change in the practices seems to have a small effect on the level of the innovation output.