The impact of innovation intensity, scope, and spillovers on sales growth in Chinese firms

We investigate the relationship between innovation and sales growth of firms in China. Innovation theories suggest firms create the technological knowledge needed to have market impact with their products and drive sales growth in different ways. These include: (1) through firms' overall innovation intensity, (2) through decisions on innovation scope (depth vs. diversity), and (3) through knowledge spillovers from technological neighbors. Little research exists on how effective these approaches are for emerging market firms in pursuit of growth. To address this, we integrate and test the effects of these different knowledge creation mechanisms using data from Chinese firms over a five-year period. Findings show that innovation intensity and knowledge spillovers positively impact sales growth. We also develop and test a model capturing the non-linear impact of innovation scope. As predicted, we find a U-shaped relationship for depth of innovation and an inverted U-shaped relationship for diversity of innovation.