An empirical study of innovation-performance linkage in the paper industry

Abstract

To enter new markets and remain competitive in the existing markets, companies need to shift their focus from<br /> traditional means and ways to some innovative approaches. Though the paper industry in India has improved<br /> remarkably on its technological and environmental issues, yet it shows a low rate of innovation. The present paper<br /> attempts to review the industry in the perspective of technological innovations and investigates empirically the role<br /> of innovations in performance improvement and pollution control. Multivariate analysis of variance and discriminant<br /> function analysis are applied for data processing. The findings reveal that the mean scores on the factors, such as<br /> sales, quality, and flexibility, are higher for the good innovators than those for the poor innovators. Conversely, the<br /> factors which are likely to be reduced as a result of innovations, such as time, cost, emissions, and disposal of<br /> waste, have shown higher means for the poor innovators.