Persistence in Innovation. Do Low-Tech Sectors Differ Much from the High-Tech?

Disentangling innovation from growth is unrealistic in the present times. Also, anticipating the future behavior of innovative firms is relevant to the entire innovation ecosystem; and assessing the persistence of innovation and appraising the role of factors affecting ongoing innovation activities in firms is essential. This chapter discusses a very important subject related to the concept of innovation persistence in relation to structural innovation characteristics of firms, with a focus on technological regimes, to better understand if there is change in innivation continuity accordingly to the technological intensity embedded in the sector. The empirical research is based on data from CIS database, comprising 3237 firms which present in the 2014 and 2018 waves. We analyze the innovative persistence behavior of these firms regarding proxies like firm dimension, innovation activities, types of innovation, government funding, and more importantly, technological regimes. To do this, we applied binary logistic regression for developing a model which can forecast the drivers of innovation persistency propensity. The presented study shows that some very important results are achieved. Besides demonstrating innovative persistency in 75% of science-based firms, the findings confirm that firms in high-tech and science-based industries are more prone to continue innovating and, as a result, this consistency in innovation will generate virtuous cycles of innovation. Furthermore, our data shows that complex innovators are more likely to persist than single innovators, proving the existence of complementarities among the innovation types.