Critical Factors Affecting the Innovation Activities of Businesses: Evidence from Binh Dinh Province, Vietnam

The study investigates the factors influencing the innovation activities in the enteiprises in the Binh Dinh Province, Vietnam. By employing the dataset from a survey in 200 typical enterprises in Binh Dinh and using the Exploratory Factor Analysis and regression analysis, we found that there are eight factor groups affecting the innovation activities of enterprises. They include management of innovation promotion; market research capacity; leadership inspiring innovation; culture of innovation; human resources for implementing innovation; network connection; disseminating/sharing knowledge; and impact of producing/serving technology. All these factors strongly affect the innovation activities, which plays an important role in promoting the sustainable development of the Vietnamese enteiprises, with the statistical significance level at 1%. Moreover, findings also show that, among these factors, the market research capacity is the strongest determinant of the innovation activity in the enterprise. An increase of 1 point of capacity of market research will increase the innovation activities in the enterprise by 0.114 point. It is followed by the management of promoting innovation, leadership inspiring innovation, and disseminating and sharing knowledge, with 0.104, 0.103 and 0.102 score, respectively. On the other hand, network connection is the weakest factor, with the score of 0.07 point.