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Innovation speed and radicalness: Innovation speed

and radicalness
are they inversely related?
A. Banu Goktan and Grant Miles
University of North Texas at Dallas, Dallas, Texas, USA 533
Abstract
Purpose – The objective in this study is to examine the relationship between innovation speed, and
radical product and process innovations.
Design/methodology/approach – A survey of firms in the high-tech (semiconductor, audio video
equipment and computer hardware) industries was conducted. Hypotheses were tested using a
hierarchical multiple regression analysis.
Findings – The results revealed a significant positive relationship between innovation speed and
both radical product and radical process innovations. Radical product and process innovations were
highly correlated in the sample.
Research limitations/implications – Response rate was relatively low to the survey, however,
control variables were included to ensure accuracy of results. This study empirically tested
inter-innovation relationships within the high-tech industry.
Practical implications – Findings suggest that firms should not avoid radical innovations with the
fear of being late to market. In addition, based on these results, product and process innovations are
closely linked to one another, and to innovation speed.
Originality/value – This is one of the few studies to examine inter-innovation relationships at the
firm level.
Keywords Innovation, World economy, Competitive advantage, Production cycle, Product life cycle
Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction
In today’s global economy competition has intensified, product life cycles have
compressed, and product obsolescence has been occurring at a fast pace. Firms have
realized that speed in product development is a source of competitive advantage.
Therefore, firms have increased their efforts to improve product development cycle
time, deliver innovative products to the market fast and be the first movers in their
industries (Griffin, 1997; Jones, 2003; Akroyd et al., 2009). “Reducing product
development cycle time and hence the time to introduce a new product can create
relative advantages in market share, profit, and long term competitive advantage”
(Karlsson and Ahlstrom, 1999, p. 352). Existing research suggests that slow product
development has a higher development cost for organizations (Gupta and Wilemon,
1990; Hairman and Clarysse, 2007). A significant cost associated with being late to
market for the organization is the possibility of losing that market.
Eisenhardt and Tabrizi’s (1995) findings suggest that factors that affect the pace of
the innovation process are different for various industries. Innovation speed is
particularly important in environments characterized by competitive intensity (Kessler
and Chakrabarti, 1999) and for firms facing rapid technological change and Management Decision
Vol. 49 No. 4, 2011
compressed product life cycles (Parry et al., 2009) such high-technology (high-tech) pp. 533-547
industries. Firms in high-tech industries face increased competition, continuous q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0025-1747
development, changing customer needs and requirements, which truncate product life DOI 10.1108/00251741111126477
MD cycles and lead to rapid obsolescence of products (Kessler and Chakrabarti, 1996;
49,4 Bernstein and Singh, 2008). For example, product life cycles are shorter in the
semiconductor, computer, and telecommunication industries (Macher and Mowrey,
2003; Herrmann et al., 2007). Firms in these industries cannot afford slow product
development cycles (Gupta and Wilemon, 1990). The ability to develop and launch
innovative products quickly before competitors do is a key success factor for
534 organizations that compete in high-tech industries (Allocca and Kessler, 2006).
Despite the importance of the topic of innovation speed and the growing interest on
the issue, research about the correlates of innovation speed is limited (Kessler and
Chakrabarti, 1996; Kessler and Bierly, 2002). Most of the existing studies that
examined innovation speed have focused on the project level (Brown and Eisenhardt,
1995; Griffin, 1997; Akroyd et al., 2009).They have examined the relationship between
new product cycle time and project newness (Griffin, 1997), project speed and product
quality (Kessler and Bierly, 2002), project process flexibility and product development
speed (Salomo et al., 2007), and project radicalness and innovation speed (Seidel, 2007).
In recent years, researchers have turned their attention to the firm level and started
emphasizing dynamic capabilities, an extension of the resource based view of the firm,
in studying innovation (e.g. Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000; Danneels, 2002; Herrmann
et al., 2007; O’Connor, 2008; Teece, 2007; Crossan and Apaydin, 2010).
Dynamic capabilities are a source of competitive advantage and they evolve over
time (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990; Teece et al., 1997). Dynamic capabilities consist of the
firm’s ability to build, adapt, integrate, reconfigure and release competencies and
resources in order to achieve competitive advantage (Teece et al., 1997). Firms can
evolve processes that enable them to develop, change and rejuvenate themselves
(O’Connor, 2008). In the dynamic capabilities framework, firms must employ
mechanisms to direct resources consistent with market needs and necessities (Teece,
2007). Within that perspective, the firm’s abilities to deliver innovations and to deliver
them fast are dynamic capabilities that create competitive advantage. These
capabilities require constant reconfiguration in line with environmental demands. For
the firms in the high-tech industry, delivering innovations and delivering them fast
have been emphasized as key dynamic capabilities for organizations.
Dynamic capability approach necessitates viewing organizations as open systems
(Koberg et al., 2003) interacting with and adopting to their environment. From a system
perspective, innovation is a complex set of elements in mutual interaction (O’Connor,
2008). Innovations take different forms; they may be in the form of products, services
or processes. Innovations also differ in magnitude; they may be incremental or radical
(Crossan and Apaydin, 2010). Each element’s success depends on the success of other
elements (O’Connor, 2008). There is need for studies in the field that take a systems
approach and examine how different forms and magnitudes of innovation relate to
each other at the firm level.
Typically, researchers focus on one dimension of innovation at a time. However, in
reality these dimensions overlap (Damanpour and Gopalakrishnan, 1998). Researchers
suggest that inter-innovation relationships have not been fully addressed (Golder et al.,
2009) and that there is need for more unified approaches to studying innovation
(Verganti, 2008). This study will contribute to the field by focusing on innovation speed
at the firm level and by examining its relationship between different forms and
magnitudes of innovation. Specifically, this study will examine the relationships
between innovation speed, and radical product and process innovations in the Innovation speed
high-tech industry. This study focuses on correlations between these dimensions of and radicalness
innovation rather than causation. An attempt to answer a cause and effect question
would require a longitudinal study (Karlsson and Ahlstrom, 1999).
According to Damanpour and Gopalakrishnan (1998), innovations come to
organizations in two ways: they may be generated or adopted. This study will focus on
innovation generation within firms rather than adoption of innovations that are 535
available in the industry. Similar inputs transformed by similar processes will lead to
similar outcomes (Crossan and Apaydin, 2010). Organizations in the high-tech industry
need to develop innovations in order to be first movers in the industry and reap the
benefits rather than adopt existing innovations (Bernstein and Singh, 2008).

2. Theoretical background and hypotheses

Radical innovations are important for organizations because of their impact on
performance (Germain, 1996). Some researchers argue they are more important to
companies and societies than incremental innovations because of their ability to create
entire new industries and destroy existing ones (Golder et al., 2009). Innovations are
categorized as radical versus incremental based on the degree of change achieved by the
change (Christensen, 1992; Sandstrom and Tingstrom, 2008). Innovation radicalness
refers to the extent to which an innovation differs from existing alternatives (Knight,
1967). It is the degree of newness and novelty of the innovations (See Nohria and Gulati,
1996; Damanpour, 1991; Zaltman et al., 1973; Johannessen et al., 2001). Innovation
radicalness answers the question “how new?” (Johannessen et al., 2001).
Radical or breakthrough innovations transform the relationship between customers
and suppliers, restructure marketplace economics, displace current products, and
create entirely new product categories. A radical innovation is a product or process
with either unprecedented performance features or familiar features that offer
significant improvements in performance or cost that transform existing markets or
create new ones (Dosi, 1988). Radical innovations refer to products and processes that
result from advances in knowledge whereas incremental innovation refers to the
continual process of improvement (Mole and Elliot, 1987). Companies, especially those
operating in high-technology fields, depend on their ability to develop radical products,
services or processes for their survival and prosperity (Jelinek and Schoonhoven, 1993;
Bernstein and Singh, 2008). As inherent in definitions, radical innovations may be in
the form of products or processes. In the following sections, innovation speed will be
examined in relation to radical product innovation and radical process innovation.
Hypotheses will be proposed and results of the study will be discussed.

2.1 Product innovation radicalness and innovation speed

“Product innovations are used to leapfrog competition, create entry barriers, establish
a leadership position, open up new distribution channels, and garner new customers to
improve market position” (Kessler and Bierly, 2002, p. 2). Product innovations involve
the introduction of new products that the organization produces, sells or gives away
(Knight, 1967). In marketing, the conventional meaning of the term innovation largely
refers to new product-related breakthroughs. Song and Xie(2000) state that a product’s
degree of innovativeness is determined by its newness to the firm that developed the
product, to the industry that the firm operates in and to the world. Depending on the
MD newness of the product, it can be categorized as either an incremental product
49,4 innovation or a radical product innovation.
“Radical innovations embody new knowledge and represent clear departures from
past practice; they tend to be both costly and risky” (Germain, 1996, p. 117). Researchers
argue that high uncertainty and complexity involved in radical product innovation make
it difficult to shorten product development time (Eisenhardt and Tabrizi, 1995; Meyer and
536 Utterback, 1995; Montaguti et al., 2002). It has been argued that the complexity of product
innovations, and the risk and uncertainty involved in radical product innovations increase
information needs, workloads and the number of people involved in the innovation
process. All of these factors lead to a loss of time in new product development (Kessler
and Chakrabarti, 1999). Several studies suggest that product newness (i.e. radicalness)
increases new product development leadtime (Swink, 2003). Therefore, we expect product
innovation radicalness to be negatively related to innovation speed.
H1. There is a negative relationship between radical product innovation and
innovation speed.

2.2 Process innovation radicalness and innovation speed

Firms now place emphasis on new product development, fast product introduction, and
first mover advantage. To implement these strategies, academicians and practitioners
stress the importance of processes utilized by the organization (Akroyd et al., 2009). In
this study, process innovation refers to technology related process innovations
(Reichstein and Salter, 2006). Within that perspective, process innovation refers to
performing a work activity in a new, innovative way (Papinniemi, 1999). A process is a
specific, structured ordering of work activities designed to produce specific outputs
(Davenport, 1993). It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an
organization. Knight (1967) defines process innovations as those that occur in the
operating component and affect the technical system of an organization. Process
innovations include introduction of new elements in the organization’s task, decisions,
and information systems or its physical production or service operations and the
advances in the technology of the company (Knight, 1967).
As discussed earlier, high-tech industries are characterized by hyper competition.
Speed of change makes previously acquired competences obsolete, and calls for new
competences to be built (Danneels, 2002). A company’s competitive advantage can
quickly erode in its dynamic and turbulent environment. In competitive environments,
firms need to develop and renew dynamic capabilities again and again in order to
achieve congruence with their rapidly changing environments and to match the
modified requirements (Teece et al., 1997; Herrmann et al., 2007). Central tenet of
dynamic capability theory is that firms can evolve processes that enable them to
develop, change and rejuvenate themselves (O’Connor, 2008). From this perspective,
firms in the high-tech industry should be focused on process innovations as dynamic
capabilities in order to keep up with changing demands of their environment.
In addition, process innovations in the high-tech industry should be radical in nature.
Incremental innovations reinforce prevailing market structures and they are generally
associated with stable environments and not appropriate for dynamic environments
(Ettlie and Subramaniam, 2004). Fast innovation in dynamic industries requires
innovation processes that can support fast innovation and intense and dynamic
competition. Path dependency literature suggests that path dependencies that lock firms
in or out of certain technologies hinder the adaptiveness of organizations (Danneels, Innovation speed
2002), therefore, has a negative effect on innovation speed, especially in high-tech firms. and radicalness
In order to break path dependency, firms should embrace radical process innovations.
Some studies suggest that management control systems help innovation speed,
whereas other studies have found that they hinder innovation speed (Akroyd et al.,
2009). A closer look at these studies reveals that innovation management techniques,
which focus on control and coordination mechanisms, increase innovation speed in 537
stable environments and hinder innovation speed in dynamic environments. Existing
evidence suggests that predictability and reliability that fosters success in stable
environments inhibit change in dynamic environments (Hill and Rothaermel, 2003).
Therefore, instead of trying to keep the status-quo through control and coordination,
high tech firms should focus on finding radical ways of doing business and enhance
their dynamic capabilities.
Similar inputs transformed by similar processes will lead to similar outcomes
(Crossan and Apaydin, 2010). In the high-tech industry, organizations need to focus on
renewing their innovation processes rather than operating similarly to others and
managing processes based on what other firms do. For example, one of the most
important factors for competitiveness in the semi-conductor industry is the ability to
deliver “new process technologies with high yields and low cycle times” (Macher and
Mowrey, 2003: p. 391). Therefore, we expect to see a positive relationship between
radical process innovation and innovation speed in the high tech industry.
H2. There is a positive relationship between process innovation and innovation
speed.
The remainder of the study is organized as follows. The next section describes the
research design and data collection process. Then, analyses methods are explained and
results presented. In the last section, implications of the findings for research and
managerial practice are discussed. The paper concludes with an acknowledgement of
the limitations as well as avenues for future research.

3. Methods
3.1 Sample
The primary procedure for collecting data for this study was a mail survey.
Respondents received a cover letter together with the survey explaining the purpose of
the study, assuring confidentiality and asking for participation. The concern in this
study was with the innovative activities of the organization and, therefore, the target
population was selected from the high-tech industry where innovation is common
(Gupta and Wilemon, 1990; Macher and Mowrey, 2003; Herrmann et al., 2007).
Research in the field suggests that environmental pressures on innovation are different
for various industries (Eisenhardt and Tabrizi, 1995). Therefore, limiting our research
to the high-tech industry eliminates the need to include environmental factors as a
control variable (Griffin, 1997).
One person from each company was contacted and the person contacted was either
a high level technical manager, such as a Chief Executive Engineering Officer, VP
Research and Development, VP Engineering, or the CEO of the company. Of the
respondents, 4.3 percent were females and 93.5 percent were males with average age of
50.69. 10.9 percent of the respondents had Doctor of Philosophy degrees, 37 percent had
MD Master’s degrees and 47.8 percent had Bachelor’s degrees. 4.4 percent of the
49,4 respondents had associate degrees or vocational/technical degrees. Of the companies
represented in the study, 21.3 percent of the companies were public companies and 76.6
percent were private companies; 50 percent of companies were in the semi-conductor
industry, 35.7 percent were in the computer hardware industry, and 14.3 percent were
in the audio video equipment industry.
538 Companies were selected based on NAICS (North American Industry Classification
System). In total, 500 companies from the semiconductor, audio video equipment and
computer hardware industries, with more than ten employees, were randomly selected.
At the end of the eight-week waiting period, as suggested by Dillman (2000), 47
responses were received constituting a 9.4 percent response rate. While the response
rate was lower than desired, we think that it is due to the nature of the sample and
respondents surveyed. Various studies have examined factors that contribute to low
response rates and some of those are applicable to this study. Effects of gender on
response rate generally suggest that women are more likely to respond to mail surveys
than men (Green, 1996). By the nature of the industries included in this study, most of
the contacts were males, which may have contributed to low response rates. In
addition, under the present stressful and competitive working life, people have less
time and energy to spend on completing questionnaires (Baruch, 1999). This is likely to
be a greater problem in dynamic business environments such as the ones included in
this study. Research also suggests that executive response rates are declining (Cycyota
and Harrison, 2002) and the sample in this study consisted of high level executives,
CEOs, or owners of the companies. All these factors combined with the trend of
declining response rates to survey research may explain the low response rate achieved
in this study. Gender was included as a control variable in the study; however, it was
not significantly related to the dependent variable. Therefore, greater representation of
males versus females should not affect results in this study.
Many studies suggest a ratio of 20 observations for each independent variable. The
minimum size recommended is five observations per independent variable (Hair et al.,
1998). The independent variables in this study include radical product innovation and
radical process innovation. Although control variables were included in the questionnaire,
correlation matrix results did not provide support for a significant relationship between
the control variables and the dependent variable (i.e. innovation speed); therefore, control
variables were not included in the analysis. Based on the literature, the sample size should
be around 40 (2 *20) and this study meets this requirement (Table I).

3.2 Measures
To overcome the problem of conflicting results in the innovation literature, the construct
of interest must be measured as accurately as possible. Although the innovation speed
measure was adopted from the existing scales in the literature, an innovation radicalness
scale was developed by the authors. Factor analysis was conducted to ensure convergent
and discriminate validities and internal consistency reliabilities were obtained on each of
the measures. To ensure internal validity, a study must be designed in such a way that
rival hypotheses are ruled out and spurious covariance among study variables are
minimized or removed. Demographic characteristics are common sources of extraneous
variance and therefore, the effects of these variables must be controlled to enhance
internal validity (Kerlinger and Lee, 2000).
 Mean SD Reliability 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Public/private 1.74 0.49 1

Firm age 22.09 16.75 2 0.27 1
Tenure 9.65 7.37 0.24 0.10 1
Education 4.48 0.94 2 0.30 * 2 0.11 2 0.18 1
Gender 1.91 0.35 2 0.01 2 0.00 2 0.08 20.01 1
Firm size 7,033.60 43,813.58 2 0.25 0.71 * * 2 0.10 20.06 0.04 1
Age 50.69 11.96 0.20 2 0.25 0.37 * 0.04 0.05 20.23 1
Innovation speed 15.30 4.76 0.87 2 0.05 2 0.01 0.05 0.27 0.11 0.19 2 0.21 1
Radical product innovation 5.57 2.53 0.97 2 0.27 2 0.03 2 0.06 0.25 20.08 0.21 0.03 0.38 * * 1
Radical process innovation 14.48 5.94 0.93 2 0.08 0.15 0.04 0.14 20.28 0.35 * 2 0.13 0.48 * * 0.61 * * 1
Note: *Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (two-tailed); * *correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (two-tailed); n ¼ 47
and radicalness

descriptive statistics
Innovation speed

Correlation matrix and

539

Table I.
MD Review of literature pertaining to organizational innovation suggests that several
49,4 demographic characteristics might have an impact on the relationship between
strategy and innovation. Most studies of innovation control for industry (Dosi, 1988;
Chatman and Jehn, 1994; Brown and Eisenhardt, 1995), organizational size (Aiken and
Hage, 1971; Abbey, 1983; Allocca and Kessler, 2006), and the age of the organization
(Koberg et al., 2003; McGahan and Silverman, 2001). Therefore, these measures were
540 included in the questionnaire. In addition, as in most studies, respondent tenure at the
company, age, gender, education level, whether the company is public or private were
also included.
3.2.1 Innovation speed. Innovation speed scale was developed by adapting four
items from Hult et al.’s (2002) subjective cycle time scale, one item was adopted from
Kessler and Chakrabarti (1996) measuring the timeliness of innovation projects and
one item was created by the authors which assesses the project completion speed
compared to other organizations in the industry (see Appendix Speed 1-6). Innovation
was measured on a five-point Likert scale ð1 ¼ completelydisagreeto5 ¼ completely
agree). Items four and six were reverse coded and the scores on the five items were
added to measure innovation speed. Item 4 was excluded from the measure because of
its very low loading on the factor (see Table II). Higher scores indicated higher
innovation speed in the firm.
3.2.2 Innovation radicalness. Although many researchers agree on newness (see
Zaltman et al., 1973; Damanpour, 1991; Nohriia and Gulati, 1996; Johannessen et al.,
2001) as an indicator of radicalness, measuring newness has been a problematic issue
( Johannessen et al., 2001). Departing from the definition radicalness as perceptions of
newness (Zaltman et al., 1973; McGrath et al., 1996), we developed the measure.
Respondents were provided the following definition of innovation radicalness:
“Radicalness is determined by the degree of newness of the innovation. The most
radical innovations are innovations that are new to the world”. Radicalness was
measured on a five-point Likert scale (1 ¼ completely disagree to 5 ¼ completely
agree). The scores on the first two items (See Appendix; radical 1, radical 2) were added
to measure radical product innovation and items radical 3 to radical 8 (See Appendix)
were added to measure radical process innovation. Results of the factor analysis
revealed that the entire item loadings were in line with expectations, and no item had to
be deleted (see Table III). Higher scores indicated greater innovation radicalness (i.e.
newness) as perceived by the respondent.

Speed Factor 1

Speed 2 0.89
Speed 3 0.84
Speed 1 0.83
Speed 5 0.79
Speed 6 (reversed) 0.72
Speed 4 (reversed) 0.29
Table II.
Results of factor analysis Notes: Extraction method: principal component analysis; Rotation method: varimax with Kaiser
for innovation speed normalization
 Innovation speed
Factor
1 2 and radicalness
Radical 5 0.87 0.24
Radical 7 0.85 0.21
Radical 8 0.83 0.27
Radical 6 0.80 0.30 541
Radical 4 0.74 0.26
Radical 3 0.72 0.50
Radical 1 0.27 0.94
Radical 2 0.31 0.93 Table III.
Results of factor analysis
Notes: Extraction method: principal component analysis; Rotation method: varimax with Kaiser for innovation
normalization radicalness

4. Analysis and results

Before analyzing the data, the data was first screened for problems that may affect
later analysis. Less than 2 percent of the observations had missing data and visual
inspected for outliers did not reveal any outliers. Therefore, no changes were made to
the data and no data points were removed. The data were visually inspected using
histograms and scatter plots to test for normal distribution. As an additional check,
numeric tests for kurtosis and skewness were conducted. The skewness measures
ranged from 2 0.05 to 0.79 and the kurtosis measures ranged from 2 1.4 to 2 0.05 and
were within limits (Huck and Cormier, 1996). The variance Inflation factor (VIF) was
computed to identify whether multicollinearity was a problem in this study. The VIF
values ranged from 1.3 to 1.7, well within the VIF limit of 10, and the conclusion was
drawn that multicollinearity was not a major problem (Hair et al., 1998).
The primary statistical techniques used to analyze data in this study included
descriptive statistics, correlations, reliability analysis (Table I), factor analysis
(Tables II and III), and multivariate hierarchical regression (Table IV). Descriptive
statistics include the means and standard deviations for all measures. The correlation
matrix provides bivariate correlations (Pearson product moment correlations) between
all control, independent, and dependent variables in the study. Some of the
inter-correlations among the variables in this study were not in line with expectations.
Contrary to expectations, results revealed a significant positive relationship between

Model 1 Model 2
Variable H1 H2

Radical product innovation 0.33 *

Radical process innovation 0.44 * *
Overall F 5.34 * 6.38 * *
R2 0.11 0.23
Adjusted R 2 0.09 0.19
Change in R 2 0.11 0.12
F change 5.38 6.68 Table IV.
Hierarchical regression
Notes: Shown are standardized betas. *p , 0.05; * *p , 0.01 results
MD radical product innovation and innovation speed ( p , 0.01). In addition, none of the
49,4 control variables were significantly related to innovation speed ( p , 0.05). This means
that they are not a source of variance in the dependent variable and, therefore, they
were not controlled for when testing the hypothesis.
Simple correlations reveal possible relationships; however, they do not take the
association between multiple variables into account. Hierarchical regression takes
542 intercorrelations into account by partialing out variance shared with other independent
variables while also addressing the multicollinearity issue. While bivariate correlations
may provide some evidence for main effects, they are misleading when independent
variables are correlated (Agarwal et al., 2002; Greve, 2003). Therefore, hierarchical
regression was used to test the model.

4.1 Hierarchical regression

Hierarchical regression model was developed to test the hypothesized relationships.
With hierarchical regression, it is possible to enter one predictor at a time to see how
each contributes to explaining the variance. Therefore, it becomes possible to separate
the variance explained by the radical product and radical process innovations (Cohen
and Cohen, 1983). None of the control variables included in the study was significantly
correlated with innovation speed.
Therefore, no control variables were entered into the regression analysis.
H1 proposed a significant negative relationship between radical product innovation
and innovation speed. Although the beta coefficient was significant at the p , 0.05 level,
contrary to expectations it was in the positive direction. Results suggest a positive
relationship between radical product innovation and innovation speed. Therefore, H1
was not supported. In line with expectations, radical process innovation was positively
and significantly ( p , 0.01) related to innovation speed. H2 was supported.

5. Discussion
The intensity of competition has been increasing among all companies but especially
among firms that operate in the high-tech industry. Fast obsolescence of products,
increasing customer demands and pressures to deliver products at lower prices
intensifies competition. Firms are pressured to deliver innovative products to the
market fast while controlling their costs to remain competitive and to survive in the
market. This requires firms to deliver radical innovations fast and to focus on radical
process innovations at the same time.
Our findings revealed a significant positive relationship between radical process
innovations and innovation speed providing support for this view. To have a
competitive edge, firms should not only deliver radically new products but also deliver
them using radically different processes than competitors. That is the only way firms
can gain and sustain competitive advantage in the high-tech industry. Contrary to
expectations, radical product innovation development was not negatively related to
innovation speed. Results revealed a significant relationship between radical product
innovation and innovation speed.
One possible explanation for the significant positive relationship between radical
product innovation development and innovation speed is that firms that are able to
survive have found ways to deliver radically innovative products and shorten product
development time at the same time in order to stay in business. Improved processes
may be the dynamic capability that enables firms to deliver radical product Innovation speed
innovations in a timely manner. Future studies need to examine the cause and effect and radicalness
relationship between product and process innovations. Another possible explanation is
that what respondents perceive as radical product innovations may not be “new to the
world” innovations. For example, Golder et al. (2009) were able to identify only 29
radical innovations since 1900 that brought substantial new benefits to customers.
One limitation of this study is that responses are based on the perceptions of the 543
individuals regarding the radicalness of the product or the process. Although
respondents were reminded that radicalness is determined by the degree of newness of
the innovation and that most radical innovations are innovations that are new to the
world, their responses were based on their perceptions of newness. Future research
needs to test for measurement invariance of perceptual innovation measures. Another
limitation of the study was the low response rate. However, as discussed in the
methods section, considering the nature of the population and the respondents
surveyed, the response rate is not surprising. In addition, the sample meets the
requirement of having 20 responses per independent variable.
It should be noted that the relationship between radical process innovation and
innovation speed might be different in industries other than the high-tech industry. It is
possible that in manufacturing industries where the firm’s core business is manufacturing,
radical process innovations may lower the innovation speed. As discussed earlier, process
management techniques have increased innovation speed in stable industries. Therefore,
our findings are relevant to the high tech industry and cannot be generalized to all
industries. Future studies should examine innovation speed in relation to radical product
and radical process innovations at the firm level in other industries.
This study has important implications for managers in the high-tech industry.
Results suggest that managers should not be hesitant to develop and implement
radical process innovations with the fear of being late to market. They may be able to
enhance innovation speed and deliver radically new products and processes at the
same time. This study supports previous research, which suggests that product and
process innovations are inextricably linked. The high correlations observed in this
study between radical product and process innovations go a step further and suggest
that radical product and radical process innovations are inextricably linked.

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Corresponding author
A.Banu Goktan can be contacted at: [email protected]
Appendix Innovation speed
and radicalness

547

Figure A1.