How Innovation Impacts Firm Growth Dynamics in Natural Resource Industries

Growth has generally been considered a crucial objective for a firm, and, consequently, it has become one of the most researched subjects in economic sciences. This paper aims to provide an in-depth study of how incremental innovation, a ubiquitous factor, affects the growth of small and large-sized firms differently. Specifically, this work examines firm growth dynamics in natural resource industries. In these industries, innovation is mainly based on processes in the form of incremental changes, and adoption of innovations has significant sunk costs. We argue that, before incremental process innovation, firm growth is directly proportional to firm size. However, in the presence of incremental innovation events, firm growth is indirectly proportional to firm size, since smaller firms pose higher strategic flexibility and can adopt innovations faster. Our empirical findings not only confirm the dependency of growth rate on firm size, rejecting Gibrat’s Law of Proportionate Effect, but highlight the relevance of incremental innovation as an inflection point of firm growth, creating a competitive opportunity window for small firms.