A Social Capital Approach for Open-mindedness and Radical Innovation Relationship

Informações

Código: MKT1926
Divisão: MKT - Marketing
Tema de Interesse: Tema 04 - Estratégias de Marketing

Autores

Marcelo Gattermann Perin, Juan Gabriel Cegarra Navarro, Daniel Jiménez Jiménez, Cláudio Hoffmann Sampaio

Resumo

Despite an extensive number of studies examining market performance as an outcome ofsocial and internal capital, there is still a lack of understanding on how such performance isgenerated. This study examines the impact of ‘open-mindedness’ on the challenging of basicbeliefs or processes that are explicitly or tacitly represented in internal and external networks.Radical innovation is also posited in this paper as a managerial priority that mediates therelationship between internal social capital and market performance. The research model andhypothesized relationships are empirically tested using the structural equation modeling(SEM) approach, validated by factor analysis of 361 companies in the Brazilian industrialsector. The study found that open-mindedness is associated with internal and external socialcapital, and external social capital mediates the effects of open-mindedness on internal socialcapital. We also observed that radical innovation mediates the effects of internal social capitalon business performance. Besides that, we found that external social capital doesn’t present adirect impact on radical innovation, probably doing it indirectly by internal social capital.Although this result is worthy of further investigation, one conclusion that might be drawn isthat since entrepreneurial activity in general, and a turbulent environment in particular,requires customer innovations, many mental models created through internal and externalsocial capital might be counterproductive without the stimulus of an open-mindedness culture.Other conclusion might be that an external knowledge for an enterprise could lead to a marketperformance, but not to a radical innovation without a necessary internal debate about thisknowledge. One of the findings of this study is that open minded firms promote thegeneration of radical innovations for developing their activities by the internal and indirectlyby external social capital. As we have found, these innovations allow companies to increasetheir performance in the marketplace. Their activities require that these organizations look fornew sources for generating ideas. Thus, an open minded organization emphasizes the creationof knowledge through a learning orientation. Our findings regarding the positive effects ofopen-mindedness, as a dimension of learning orientation, on business performance aresupported by previous studies (Baker and Sinkula, 1999, Kropp et al. 2006). That is, firmswith open minded posture will achieve higher levels of performance, since they develop betterproducts and are more likely to adapt to the changing marketplace by radical innovation. Thatinfluence will be carried by the intensity of internal and external social capital approach. Thatis to say that when firms are opened to adopt new processes, to review its procedures andexercise the unlearning process, they are more likely to achieve radical innovations in termsof processes and products.

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