– The purpose of this paper is twofold: to quantify the communication of organizational innovativeness (OI) on a large scale; and to examine the relationship of communicating OI and the corresponding investments in research and development (R&D) of multinational corporations (MNCs).
– In total, 3,043 annual reports from 326 MNCs are examined utilizing quantitative content analysis, which focusses on fixed selected terminologies, in the years 1998-2008.
– Scholars assume that the capacity for OI is becoming the single most important task in organizational survival. Even though in the sample the investments in R&D are not increasing, even slightly declining, the communication of OI is increasing. Using mixed-effects regression analysis, the findings indicate that the corporations that are investing in R&D are also communicating these efforts correspondingly.
– This is the first study that measures the communication of OI using quantitative content analysis.
– The results indicate that not only do the communication efforts of an organization’s OI have a perceived increasing importance. They also suggest that OI itself has become more important for organizations from a strategic point of view.
