A influência das capacidades dinâmicas de inovação de serviços no desempenho de startups brasileiras

Abstract

One of the oldest and recurring dilemmas in the academic context of economic and strategic management, and which motivates research in the most renowned institutions around the globe, is the understanding of the characteristics and factors that drive business success and perpetuity of organizations. Despite the complexity involved in this issue, it is a fact that innovation is an indispensable condition for the generation of new technologies, for the increase of productivity and, consequently, a determining factor for the generation of competitive advantages for the companies and for the economic progress of nations. Once innovation is understood as the combination of productive means to generate a new or significantly improved product (good or service), the management object becomes not the innovation itself, but the organizational processes that generate these innovative results. In this sense, this work is dedicated to analyzing how Brazilian service provider startups acquire, convert and apply knowledge in these processes through a set of skills called Dynamic Services Innovation Capabilities (DSICs) and, ultimately, in what way these capabilities influence the performance of these businesses. This analysis is important because the contemporary economy is both service economy and innovation economy and startups are protagonists of this new era, given that the essence of its organizational model is innovation. A total of 137 startups from all Brazilian regions were submitted to a descriptive-exploratory research, following the model proposed by Janssen, Castaldi and Alexiev (2016). As results of this study, it is firstly understood the profile of these organizations and their managers. Then, the validity of the instrument for the searched reality was verified. Finally, the results of the statistical analyzes indicate that the DSICs and their dimensions are present in the startups, generally in a high degree, and exert influence on the performance of the analyzed organizations, mainly in terms of return on equity, profit, turnover and market share. However, unlike in the primary study with a heterogeneous sample of organizations, the DSICs did not present satisfactory relations with the startups revenue behavior, which leads to the understanding that the presence of these capacities in this context is insufficient to determine, for example, the specific performance of innovation. This result suggests the existence of other antecedents that, in addition to DSICs, should influence the performance of innovative products, which need to be analyzed in future studies.