The use of organisational resources for product innovation and organisational performance: A survey of the Brazilian furniture industry

Innovation represents an efficient way to improve competitiveness and organisation performance. In this sense, innovation is attributed to optimize the use of resources in organisations and better market positioning. In such context, the Brazilian furniture industry constantly promotes product innovation, which looks for customer's satisfaction and comfort needs. Product innovation is an important source of competitive advantage, being responsible for increasing the financial performance of Brazilian organisations. Thus, identifying the resources that precede innovation is critical to maximize their results. The objective of this research is to measure the relation between Product Innovation, Resources and Organizational Performance, considering the premises of the literature for the furniture industry in Brazil, with the Structural Equation Modeling methodology. Therefore, a survey of 618 companies was carried out in a Furniture cluster from South Brazil. This research evaluated the intensity of the relationship between Knowledge Management Structure resources with Knowledge Management Culture, and Human Resource Alliance and these resources with new product and organisational performance. The main contributions of this study are the identification of the product innovation and organisational performance, but also the enhancement of research tools of statistical analysis. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.