The Business Innovation Function: Its role in innovation learning, innovation capability building and innovation performance enhancement

How to improve the innovation performance of established firms continues to be a confounding issue. We show that the new phenomenon of a dedicated business innovation function (BIF) is positively related to a firm’s innovation performance, innovation learning process (involving articulation, codification, sharing, and internalization) and helps to build up an innovation capability. The latter also has a positive effect on a firm’s innovation performance itself. We will use interviews with managers and large sample survey data drawn from the innovation activities of established corporations to test our hypotheses. Our results will show that innovation can be learnt, how the BIF facilitates innovation learning as well as open the black box of how learning leads to the development of an organizational innovation capability.