An empirical study of innovation-performance linkage in the paper industry

To enter new markets and remain competitive in the existing markets, companies need to shift their focus from traditional means and ways to some innovative approaches. Though the paper industry in India has improved remarkably on its technological and environmental issues, yet it shows a low rate of innovation. The present paper attempts to review the industry in the perspective of technological innovations and investigates empirically the role of innovations in performance improvement and pollution control. Multivariate analysis of variance and discriminant function analysis are applied for data processing. The findings reveal that the mean scores on the factors, such as sales, quality, and flexibility, are higher for the good innovators than those for the poor innovators. Conversely, the factors which are likely to be reduced as a result of innovations, such as time, cost, emissions, and disposal of waste, have shown higher means for the poor innovators.