Efectos de la gestión de la calidad sobre el desempeño innovador: el papel mediador de las capacidades dinámicas de aprendizaje e innovación

Abstract

In the current environment governed by rapid change, innovation plays an essential role, becoming the basis for creating and sustaining competitiveness. The innovative performance of the company, from the perspective of Dynamic Capabilities, is basically determined by the innovation capabilities. These innovative capabilities are integrated by the Capacity for the R&D Management and the Capacity for Organizational Learning. On the other hand, firms have adopted practices related with the Quality Management philosophy in order to adapt themselves to the needs that market requires to survive and cope with competition; these quality practices can also help to improve the innovative performance of firms and their competitive advantages. However, the effect of the Quality Management Practices on the innovative performance is a controversial topic in the literature that has led to mixed results. This lack of consensus may be partly due to the omission of certain variables that may act as mediators in the relationship between Quality Management Practices and the innovative performance. This paper attempts to shed light on this controversy by studying the influence of the use of Quality Management Practices on the process innovation performance, both directly and through the development of Dynamic Capabilities. With the aim of testing this model, we use a database of 550 industrial firms in the Valencian Comunity and a structural equation model with the methodology Structural Equations Modeling (SEM). The results indicate that the firm�s stock of Dynamic Capabilities is essential in order to determine its innovative performance. It is also found that the degree of the organizational adoption of Quality Management Practices is directly related to the Organizational Learning Capacity and the Capacity for the R&D Management. However, this model demonstrates that the Quality Management Practices have not a direct influence on the performance of process innovation, but these practices could have an indirect effect on this kind of performance by developing the Dynamic Capabilities. Therefore, the Dynamic Capabilities - represented by the Organizational Learning and the Capacity for R&D Management - is a variable that mediates the effect of the diffusion of the Quality Management Practices on the process innovation performance.