TÜRK TAKIM TEZGÂHLARI SANAYİNDE İNOVASYON PERFORMANSINI BELİRLEYİCİ FAKTÖRLERİN ARAŞTIRILMASI

Abstract

Machine tool industry is the essential sector producing investment goods among the industrial sectors and thus has a strategic importance. Innovation in the machine tool industry focuses typically on the technological properties of individual machine tools and their development. In general, the manufacturers are not large scaled. When the technological regime characteristics and innovation patterns of the machine tool sector are considered, the industry has a typical "Specialized Supplier Industry" characteristic in which tacit knowledge accumulated in the interface between the manufacturer and the user is important for the classification of industry of Pavitt. The direction of innovation process in the industry is largely determined by customer requirements. New products are often developed for a specific need of the user and they are launched into the market. Therefore, innovation performances of machine tool producers depend on their new product developing skills. For this reason, this paper focuses on interrelation of product innovation and innovation performance at firm level. To exploring this relation data were collected using a questionnaire from 82 machine tool producers in Turkish machinery industry. The collected data was analyzed with Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) technique. The findings revealed that product innovation has significance positive relationship with firm performance. The findings also revealed that antecedents of product innovation are R&D, investment and external connection capabilities. It has been concluded from this study that improving technological capabilities can increase firms’ innovation performance.Keywords: Innovation, Turkish Machine Tool Industry, PLS-SEM Technique