The role of product innovation on export behavior of firms: Is it innovation input or innovation output that matters?

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of innovation on the export behavior of firms.

Using two waves of Swedish Community Innovation Survey merged with register data on firm-level, the authors estimate the influence of the innovation output and innovation input of firms on their export propensity and intensity.

The authors find that the innovation output of firms (measured as sales due to innovative products) has a positive and significant effect on their subsequent export behavior, particularly on export intensity. The results also show that there is no direct effect of innovation input (innovative efforts) on export behavior.

This is one of the first paper that clearly distinguishes between input and output parts of innovation process and empirically investigate their differentiated impact on export behavior of a representative sample of firms in an entire economy.