Product innovation strategy and firm performance: Novelty and internationalization as mediators
研究了资源受限的中小企业如何通过四种产品创新战略（自主研发、外部购买、合作、模仿）影响企业绩效，发现产品新颖性是关键中介路径，而国际化无显著中介作用。
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) engaged in innovation often face resource constraints that limit their ability to perform effectively. This study investigates the strategies SMEs in low-resource environments employ to overcome these constraints in their pursuit of product innovation. It further examines how these strategies influence firm performance, using novelty and internationalization as mediators. We categorize the product innovation strategies into four distinct groups: internal investment in R&D (make), acquiring innovations from other enterprises (buy), collaboration (ally), and imitating existing products (imitate). Drawing on the resource and knowledge-based views, we assess how the firms’ internal and external innovation activities influence their outcomes. Utilizing the National Innovation Survey (NIS) dataset for Uganda, comprising 589 manufacturing SMEs, we applied a partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach to test the hypothesis. The results reveal no direct effect of innovation strategy on performance. However, the make and buy strategies indicate direct positive effects on performance. Novelty mediates the relationship between product innovation strategy and performance, while internationalization shows no effect. The ally and imitate strategies enhance performance indirectly via novelty. We conclude that product novelty is the dominant pathway through which product innovation strategies yield performance benefits, without which strategies exert little or no effect. By disaggregating the innovation strategies, we show that their value-creation pathways are heterogeneous. The results suggest the need for supportive policies to enhance firm capacities for generating novel products.