A Research On The Relationship Between Firm Competencies And Product Innovation

Nowadays, with the increasing market competition and diversified consumers'needs, firms in fast consuming industry have realized product innovation is critical to the success of a firm. However, a survey shows that the possibility of successful product innovation is rare in the practice of product innovation. There are many reasons for that, many scholars gave their own explanations. How to foster their firm competencies to adjust the needs of product innovation becomes the focus of academic circles and enterprise circles.The past research had shown that the integration of customer competencies and technical competencies are positive to product innovation. A survey conducted in fast consuming industry demonstrated that organizational competencies can strengthen creativity, promote successful product innovation. This article continues the study, we focus on the influence of the integration of customer competencies, technical competencies and organizational competencies on product innovation. We define product innovation as incremental innovation and radical innovation, and try to find out how to match different competencies to realize maximal product innovation.Our research shows that customer competencies, technical competencies, organizational competencies respectively have a positive impact on product innovation, the integration of customer competencies, technical competencies have a significant impact on product innovation, while the integration of all the three competencies have the most significant impact on product innovation. At the same time, our study shows that the impact of customer competencies on incremental innovation is significant, while the impact of customer competencies on radical innovation is not significant, the impact of organizational competencies on radical innovation is larger than that on incremental innovation. At last, we calculate a regression formula of firm competencies to product innovation.The result of this study have realistic enlightenment on product innovation of firms, we have to match different firm competencies when dealing with incremental innovation and radical innovation, customer competencies contribute more to incremental innovation, but little to radical innovation; technical competencies are both critical to incremental innovation and radical innovation; In order to realize successful product innovation, firms should focus on organizational competencies, which have the most significant impact on product innovation, those firms that integrated all the three competencies realized maximal product innovation.