Antecedent and Consequence of Innovation Output: Evidence from Thailand

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The aims to examine the impact of research and development (R&D) investment on competitive advantage for the innovation output of private firms in Thailand. The paper seems to have been estimated with structural equation model which was neither specified nor explained. While the paper has good merit for publication, it is poorly done methodologically and need significant improvement before it can be published. The following comments are made to help improve the paper.

 

 

1.     In the abstract line, authors refer to “Office of Higher Education Science Policy Council National Research and Innovation” as the registration source of the Thai firms under used for the study. The author needs to clarify this office as against “Office of National Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation Policy Council “.

2.     In line 31, the statement “… this country lacks the capability to expand…” is unsupported by be any fact or reference. Additionally, not supported by the preceding sentence. This appears an opinionated statement stated as fact.

3.     In addition to the two tables in the methodology, the authors should explore graphical representation of the primary data such as simple pie chart or bar chart.

4.     In line 421, the authors alluded to a model that was independently examined in table 5. The paper seems to have been estimated with a structural equation model (SEM) which a priori is not specified and explained. It is in fact missing in the abstract. While SEM can effectively construct a mediating role in complex relationships between observed and latent variables (the measurement model) and the relationships among latent variables (the structural model), no such effort was made to explain this in the paper. This must be looked into.

5.     It is also important to establish that SEM is only a confirmatory technique and used as a second-generation statistical tool usually to base model. This paper has no specification of base model establishing the relationship of the variables used. This must be looked into.

6.     The authors mentioned causal factors twice in line 9 and line 349. Careful use of causal factors not to imply causality analysis in the paper must be considered. I will suggest the term to be omitted.

7.     Table 5 is confusing bit. Was the model fit run before the model was estimated with result in Table 6? It should be clear that equation-level goodness-of-fit statistics serve as a diagnostic to verify that the estimated SEM on these hypotheses is true when the goodness of fit of the model is good and has multivariate normality. This must be clear to the reader.

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

okay

Author Response

Comments 1:       In the abstract line, authors refer to “Office of Higher Education Science Policy Council National Research and Innovation” as the registration source of the Thai firms under used for the study. The author needs to clarify this office as against “Office of National Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation Policy Council “.

Response 1:        We have made the corrections. The correct one is: “Office of National Higher Education Science Research and Innovation Policy Council”

 

Comments 2:       In line 31, the statement “… this country lacks the capability to expand…” is unsupported by be any fact or reference. Additionally, not supported by the preceding sentence. This appears an opinionated statement stated as fact.

Response 1:        We have adjusted our comments. accordingly, citing past research and expanding on the findings. in line 30 – 35

 

Comments 3:       In addition to the two tables in the methodology, the authors should explore graphical representation of the primary data such as simple pie chart or bar chart.

Response 1:        We have added the chart Number of companies registered with The Office of the Higher Education Science Policy Council National Research and Innovation. In figure 1

 

Comments 4:       In line 421, the authors alluded to a model that was independently examined in table 5. The paper seems to have been estimated with a structural equation model (SEM) which a priori is not specified and explained. It is in fact missing in the abstract. While SEM can effectively construct a mediating role in complex relationships between observed and latent variables (the measurement model) and the relationships among latent variables (the structural model), no such effort was made to explain this in the paper. This must be looked into.

Response 4:        We have added an explanation of the meaning and significance of the role of the mediating variable using the analysis with a structural equation model in the methodology section and expanded the content in the abstract section.

 

Comments 5:       It is also important to establish that SEM is only a confirmatory technique and used as a second-generation statistical tool usually to base model. This paper has no specification of base model establishing the relationship of the variables used. This must be looked into.

Response 5:       We added this description to the article in line 394. Structural equation modeling analysis is an examination of the consistency of the structural equation model developed by researchers from concepts, theories, literature, and research related to empirical data, including the calculation of the magnitude of both direct and indirect influences of the structural equation model. This study aims to examine both the direct influence of R&D investment on competitive advantage, the direct influence of innovation output on competitive advantage, and to examine the indirect influence of innovation output as a mediator in the relationship between R&D investment and competitive advantage.

 

Comments 6:       The authors mentioned causal factors twice in line 9 and line 349. Careful use of causal factors not to imply causality analysis in the paper must be considered. I will suggest the term to be omitted.

Response 6:        We have revised this by avoiding mention of causal factors and instead explaining the mediator factor mediating the effect of innovation output on the relationship between R&D investment and firm performance competitive advantage.

 

Comments 7:       Table 5 is confusing bit. Was the model fit run before the model was estimated with result in Table 6? It should be clear that equation-level goodness-of-fit statistics serve as a diagnostic to verify that the estimated SEM on these hypotheses is true when the goodness of fit of the model is good and has multivariate normality. This must be clear to the reader.

Response 7:        To avoid confusion, we have modified Table 5 by placing the model fit number before Acceptable Fit and updated the legend in Table 5 to confirm that equation-level goodness-of-fit statistics serve as a diagnostic to verify that the estimated SEM on these hypotheses.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The problem of studying the impact of investments in research and development on the innovative development of a company is a very urgent problem, since the experience of a number of countries demonstrates that investments do not always lead to the expected innovative effects. Different authors express different points of view when explaining the reasons for this fact, paying attention, including to country specifics. Therefore, the analysis of Thailand's experience, characterized by a significant increase in business innovation activity in recent years, is of scientific interest both from a theoretical and practical point of view.

The authors rightly point out that investments in research and development have an indirect rather than direct impact on the formation of an organization's competitive advantages. And to explain this influence, they use the theory of dynamic abilities. 

Comments and recommendations.

1. A significant part of the Introduction section is devoted to an overview of sources, which should be placed in the appropriate section of the article. In the introduction, it is desirable to formulate more briefly the essence of the scientific problem that the authors are going to solve. At the same time, the literature review itself is structured in such a way that a very brief overview of sources is presented on certain aspects of the problem, and a very detailed one on others. It is desirable to harmonize the presentation of the text, perhaps by suggesting a slightly different structuring of the review of sources.

2. In the empirical part of the study, it is not clear how private companies were chosen. There are 115 of them. They were chosen from 3 fields of activity. However, it is not clear, in the end, which companies formed the sample. From how many companies were they chosen (all companies in Thailand?), how? Was the resulting sample somehow checked for its adequacy to the set goals? Is it possible, for example, that all the companies in the sample turned out to be from the service sector? Who were the experts from the companies? How competent were they? Has a response been received from all companies? How many questionnaires were received in the end? Have procedures been carried out to assess the consistency of expert opinions? All these questions remain unclear from the presented study and require clarification.

3. The methodology for evaluating the results of the study is generally understandable. But how much one can trust the conclusions made by the authors largely depends on how the sample was formed. Therefore, initially I would like to receive answers to the questions specified in paragraph 2

Author Response

Comments 1:       A significant part of the Introduction section is devoted to an overview of sources, which should be placed in the appropriate section of the article. In the introduction, it is desirable to formulate more briefly the essence of the scientific problem that the authors are going to solve.

At the same time, the literature review itself is structured in such a way that a very brief overview of sources is presented on certain aspects of the problem, and a very detailed one on others. It is desirable to harmonize the presentation of the text, perhaps by suggesting a slightly different structuring of the review of sources.  

Response 1:        Thanks for your advice. We have revised the introduction section, briefly summarizing the research problem, and reorganizing the content from the literature review presented in the introduction, while still clearly demonstrating the research problem.

 

Comments 2:       In the empirical part of the study, it is not clear how private companies were chosen. There are 115 of them. They were chosen from 3 fields of activity. However, it is not clear, in the end, which companies formed the sample. From how many companies were they chosen (all companies in Thailand?), how? Was the resulting sample somehow checked for its adequacy to the set goals? Is it possible, for example, that all the companies in the sample turned out to be from the service sector? Who were the experts from the companies? How competent were they? Has a response been received from all companies? How many questionnaires were received in the end? Have procedures been carried out to assess the consistency of expert opinions? All these questions remain unclear from the presented study and require clarification 

Response 2:        In line 352, the number was incorrect. We have corrected it to be 151 companies. We randomly selected from all 9000 companies operating in Thailand registered with The Office of National Higher Education Science Research and Innovation Policy Council and randomly sent the questionnaire to 735 companies and 151 companies responded. The response rate is 20.54 percent. We have added this description to the article in line 349

This research organized the questions by using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) that extracted the components by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) by specifying a single component and not rotating the axes. The analysis results showed that the cumulative variance extraction was 32.72%, indicating that this research did not have a Common Method Bias problem because the values ​​obtained from the questionnaire questions were less than 50% (Eichhorn, 2014). Therefore, it can be explained that this survey research using questionnaires, which specified only one respondent, did not have bias from the data collection method. Initially, the data can be considered for analysis according to the conceptual framework. The questionnaire responses will be specified. We have added this description to the article in line 399

The questionnaire passed the IOC assessment, the consistency of 3 experts, and the reliability measurement from the analysis of data from 151 sample respondents by checking the content validity, checking the relationship between the questions and the entire instrument (Item-Total Correlation), which should be more than 0.30 (Hair Jr., Black, Babin, & Anderson, 2010). From the inspection, it was found that the questions had the discrimination power of each item, which was between 0.310 - 0.822. We have added this description to the article in line 414

 

Comments 3:       The methodology for evaluating the results of the study is generally understandable. But how much one can trust the conclusions made by the authors largely depends on how the sample was formed. Therefore, initially I would like to receive answers to the questions specified in paragraph 2 

Response 3:        Thank you for your advice. We have provided more details about the data collection method and provided information on how to check the reliability of the questionnaire in the article.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The methodology is still lacking a baseline model that specifies the relationship of the variables under study. The authors should look into this for the good of the paper.  

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I am satisfied with the changes made in the article.