Management of the Company’s Innovation Development: The Case for Polish Enterprises
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article focuses on an interesting research topic. How to measure innovativeness is a dificult and though question for managers.
However, the authors should improve their approach because eventually they do not offer managerial conclusions about how innovativeness should be measured and controlled.
The literature review (section 2) summarizes such difficulties and section 3 offers some insights about the practicalities of measuring innovations but there is little conection between these sections and the research carried out by the authors.
I would suggest to reinforce the discussion section by explaining how the measures and ratios developed in the results section overcome the limitations of previous approaches to measure innovativeness. There is not any explanation about how ratios such as the innovation scope ratio or the final goods ratio are related to the literature or are being used by other scholars or innovation agencies.
Besides, the empirical study is very descriptive and therefore a multivariate statistical analysis, if possible, could offer some interesting conclusions about the impact of innovation efforts on the competitiveness of the firms in order to validate the relevance of the competitiveness measures.
Author Response
Dear Sirs,
Thanking you for the analysis of our work and its review, we would like to respond to the content cited in it.
We totally agree with the opinion that we should improve our approach, especially with the relation with managerial conclusions, how innovativeness should be measured and controlled. It is obvious that we would like to do it, even when we were started the concept of our article. Innovation and innovativeness is a complex problem and authors who already made some articles about, they have still some problems with identification measures and suggestions for managers how to manage these processes within companies.
It refers to our literature review where we have pointed out the difficulties with managerial conclusions, so it means the practicalities of measuring innovation.
During the development of the concept of this article, we discuss a lot on the measures and ratios we should use because we have been keeping in mind many of the research and articles which concentrated on different measures. The same was with innovation agencies which used in their investigations different methods. So, we were a little bit confused, and then we found the data and information prepared by GUS (Central Statistical Office in Poland) which were interested from our point of view. The study was based on research carried out by the Central Statistical Office (it is the only organization that is able to conduct a survey of this type on such a large scale in the country). The results of these studies were included in various reports and many reports of the Central Statistical Office - only then were they collected jointly by the authors of the article, reworked, from which one consistent synthesis was created. This is the Authors' contribution to the development of primary data.
Additionally, the authors relied on the measures and indicators proposed by the Central Statistical Office (providing the primary data) and did not want to interfere with them, treating it as unauthorized. This is the main reason why they were left in their original shape. The authors, however, fully agree with the reviewer's opinion that the measures of innovation could in this case be different or set differently. The authors' aim, however, was to present a certain situation and its background based on the collected data and the applied measures, distinguished by the Central Statistical Office.
Our investigation was maybe not so deep, but we are treating it as an introduction to the next step. The data we used, we think, that were pretty enough to realize the main goals for the article. But of course, we take the suggestions from the reviewer and we will improve this article in particular sections. Therefore, as suggested by the Reviewer, the Authors strengthened the discussion section by explaining how the measures and indicators developed in the results section try to overcome the limitations of previously known approaches to measuring innovation.
The next step mentioned above will be using more statistical measures which could offer some interesting conclusions about the impact of innovation efforts on the competitiveness of the companies. On the other hand in the reviewed article we did not want to put so many issues because of the limitations of such articles prepared for this Journal.
Thank you again for the review.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
A quite good research paper based on survey made by the authors. Statistical methodology isn't used but not really needed.
However, the text after the literature review should restructured in a way that a methodology chapter should be created, where the readers could find and read the methods in a comprehensive and compact form.
The éiterature review should be extended and also some other papers with similar topics should be cited and compared.
Discussion and Conclusion chapter isn't a good solution. These should be separated: a real discussion should be written and a good conclusions at the end. Both part should be longer.
Author Response
Dear Sirs,
Thanking you for the analysis of our work and its review, we would like to respond to the content cited in it. Thank you as well for appreciating our efforts in creating this article.
However, we are aware of some shortcomings in this article for various reasons.
Referring to the review, we have tried to describe the methodology in the literature section, when particular authors pointed out different approaches to these important issues which are innovation and innovativeness. Among a great number of such approaches, we had to concentrate on those which will be closely related to data and information we got from the report made by GUS (the Central Statistical Office in Poland). This conditioned our approach to the subject of research itself, the methods and measures used by us, and the results of these studies, which we presented in our article. Explanation of the methodology used in the article was described and filled in part 4.
The study was based on research carried out by the Central Statistical Office (it is the only organization that is able to conduct a survey of this type on such a large scale in the country). The results of these studies were included in various reports and many reports of the Central Statistical Office - only then were they collected jointly by the authors of the article, reworked, from which one consistent synthesis was created. This is the Authors' contribution to the development of primary data.
Additionally, the authors relied on the measures and indicators proposed by the Central Statistical Office (providing the primary data) and did not want to interfere with them, treating it as unauthorized. This is the main reason why they were left in their original shape. The authors, however, fully agree with the reviewer's opinion that the measures of innovation could in this case be different or set differently. The authors' aim, however, was to present a certain situation and its background based on the collected data and the applied measures, distinguished by the Central Statistical Office.
We also accept comments on the discussions and summaries to separate them, but probably for purely technical reasons, we limited it in this article, stating that such in-depth research, with more methodology considerations and then discussion, will be conducted at subsequent stages of our research.
Thank you again for the review.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors use data obtained from a SMOP, an innovation-incentive program in Poland, comprising survey of about 1200 companies in two rounds, to compute series of “innovation measures.” The aim of these measures, termed “ratios” by the authors, is not fully articulated (although there is some discussion on p. 5 about indirect measurement). Presumably their main purpose is to provide for better transparency and comparability of innovation by small and medium-sized companies.
Overall, my impression of the paper is a bit mixed. Sections 4-6, arguably the heart of the study, was quite interesting, as I learned quite a bit of details about innovation in Poland. Since, as I understand, the authors did not design the study itself, it is slightly unclear what exactly is their contribution versus what is part of this study. Regarding the innovation measures (on pp. 8-9), it is not fully clear to me why each one referred to as a “ratio” when in fact some are just Likert scales or weighted averages and the like. Of course, every number is a ratio (when dividing it by 1), but I find the terminology slightly misleading. Also, when going into more detail, the various weights used in the measured seemed quite ad hoc and ultimately unjustified (e.g., why use the scores the authors propose for national and international innovations? How were they derived? What if one uses different scores?) In addition, it is not clear to me that these measures could be easily replicated by others, because their definitions are not 100% clear (perhaps an appendix is needed for that). In my view, one of the authors’ main objectives should be the clarity and replicability of their measures. In this vein, some graphs should also be added to better illustrate the results in these sections. Finally, as already mentioned, the authors need to be precise about their contributions to the data already available.
As far as the introductory sections (Secs. 1-3) and the conclusion (Sec. 7) are concerned, I was not very impressed. The authors’ discussion lacks focus, and the English is really very poor with many wordy formulations (e.g., “… exercised conversations related to discussions …”, p. 1) that really do not make much sense. There are also numerous unreferenced statements of fact (e.g., “It is accepted that …”, p. 1) given without any reference. A professional native proofreader could help a lot. But first, the authors need to clearly think through what motivation and discussion they want to provide to the reader, so that s/he wants to read on to the more interesting Secs. 4-6. Regarding the content, I was a bit surprised that “smart specialization” was not referenced and discussed at all, given that the main focus program in Poland seemed to have been quite related.
Minor comments
- Abstract: “The main aim of the paper is to acquire new knowledge … “ ???!!! “Various methods were used …” ?? … Basically the entire abstract needs to be rewritten to clearly articulate what the authors have done.
- 2: NIS … is that the same as KIS? All acronyms should be properly defined at their first occurrence.
- 3: Referencing switches from round parentheses to square parentheses (?!)
- 13: “The average value of this ratio …” – Overall, the average value of any of these ratios is not very interesting. What is needed is the distribution of these ratios (e.g., in a histogram) among the population of companies, and a description (or quantitative analysis) of how the proposed measures correlate with observable characteristics and whether they are orthogonal, thus providing additional information. Of course, the bigger question is if any of the measures has any predictive value, for example for the financial success of the company.
Author Response
Dear Sirs,
Thanking you for the analysis of our work and its review, we would like to respond to the content cited in it.
In our article, we actually used the data posted on its website by the Central Statistical Office. However, we did not use all the measures presented there, although we agree with the opinion of the reviewer that we wanted to ensure transparency and comparability of data and information in the group of enterprises we describe.
It is a fact that we did not design this study, but used some of the data and information from the GUS study to conduct our own analysis of this data with the appropriate set purpose of our article, which is the presentation of the current situation in the field of innovativeness of Polish enterprises. The study was based on surveys conducted by the Central Statistical Office (it is the only organization that is able to conduct such a survey on such a large scale in the country). The results of these studies were included in various reports and many reports of the Central Statistical Office - only then were they collected jointly by the authors of the article, re-edited, from which one coherent synthesis was created. This is the Authors' contribution to the compilation of primary data.
The issue of measures of innovation used in our article is a discussion that researchers have been conducting for a long time in various publications, starting from the first edition of the Oslo Manual, through many articles indicating the use of such and not other measures of innovation. In our article, we did not try to build new measures, but on the basis of the literature on the subject, use such measures that will allow the achievement of the article's objectives. The results of our investigations entitled us to present our thoughts and perhaps also to draw conclusions in the field of introducing innovations on a national and international scale. Additionally, the authors relied on the measures and indicators proposed by the Central Statistical Office (providing the primary data) and did not want to interfere with them, treating it as unauthorized. This is the main reason why they were left in their original shape. The authors, however, fully agree with the reviewer's opinion that the measures of innovation could in this case be different or set differently. However, the authors' aim was to present a certain situation and its background based on the collected data and the applied measures, separated by the Central Statistical Office.
Referring to the proposal contained in the review, suggesting the addition of some charts, perhaps this would illustrate more the results of our analysis in individual sections, but we also had a limited number of pages in this article. Perhaps, this could be done and done in a slightly larger form than a journal article, where the possibilities for publishing longer articles are limited.
Referring to the comments of the reviewer about the discussion conducted in the initial parts of the article, we have often quoted opinions expressed in previous publications on a given topic. These were opinions, perhaps a bit controversial, but we tried to present them without dividing them into better and worse. It seemed to us that these thoughts in the so-called literature part of our article is sufficient to analyze and evaluate the development of innovation in Polish enterprises. To illustrate this, we present a small fragment of our text from the first page, where we clearly indicate the source of this text: ‘It is accepted that one must be innovative in order to be competitive. It should be noted though that innovation can be interpreted in different ways (Frascati Manual, OECD 2002; Oslo Manual, OECD 2005; Rogers, 1998). Various interpretations of innovation make for an imposing obstacle when researching this subject.’
We also used the available translators many times, and at the same time the final version was checked by a so-called native speaker before we sent our article to the journal. However, under the influence of the review, the text was re-checked for linguistic correctness and changed in the fragments indicated during the correction. This applies in particular to parts 1-3 and 7 indicated by the Reviewer.
In turn, adding new categories to our research, although it may be right in the perspective of more in-depth and extended research, would result in additional text being added and thus extend this article.
Referring now to the so-called minor comments, we would like to thank you for the suggestion and were input the following changes:
Abstract: according to the absolutely right remark abstract was completely changed in its main fragments.
- All acronyms should be properly defined at the bottom of the article. Both acronyms and KIS and NIS, which refers to the research, the elements of which we used in our work, have been explained.
- Another remark, absolutely correct, relates to the use of round parentheses or square parentheses and we undertake to correct this in the text of the article.
- The last remark concerned the concept of the average value of the indicator, which could be better expressed by presenting the results on a histogram. Yes, it is true, but we thought that the methods of presentation used by us are sufficient for the reader of our article. In turn, it is difficult to judge the predictive value of the article (and its conclusions) for the financial success of the company. However, this will require further in-depth research and their presentation in the next article, because now, after the comments from the review, we already know what to look for and how to present the research results.
Finally, we would like to thank once again the Reviewer of our article for his thorough evaluation and suggestions to improve the text of the article.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
I am satisfied with the response from the authors and the changes introduced in the revised manuscript. Good luck in your research.
