著者

平井 孝志

出版者

日本経営学会

雑誌

日本経営学会誌 (ISSN:18820271)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.47, pp.46-60, 2021 (Released:2022-09-21)

参考文献数

34

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Dynamic capabilities framework is becoming increasingly important for both sustainable competitive advantage and continuous superior business performance. In engaging dynamic capabilities, R&D activities plays an important role. Contribution of R&D investments to scale growth has been confirmed in past empirical studies, but its effect on profitability improvement remains inconclusive. This ambiguous result might be due to inadequate approaches to measuring the causal relationship between R&D investments and business performance. This study examines a dynamic model from the perspective of dynamic capabilities to understand the effect of R&D investments on profitability through an empirical analysis of large Japanese manufacturers. By introducing a dynamic capability perspective, we identified that long-term, disequilibrium development and circular logic are key attributes for understanding improvement of profitability. Our model also clarified how the impact of R&D activities on profitability should be measured. For the empirical analysis, we investigated the performance of 189 publicly-traded manufacturers in Japan over a period of 27 years from 1989 to 2015. The three major findings are (1) companies which continuously increased R&D intensity improved profitability in the long run; (2) R&D intensity generated larger impact on incremental profitability in R&D intensive industries; and (3) cycles of fluctuation were 4.1 years for R&D intensity, 4.0 years for operating income, and 5.1 years for sales. Our findings suggest that, even while the importance of open innovation is being touted, R&D intensity should be increased slightly but continuously to strengthen R&D activities to enhance dynamic capabilities and achieve higher profitability. Paradoxically, even in today's environment of uncertainty and accelerated change, companies may need to take a long-term view of managing disequilibrium development with a timespan of about 10 years, including 2 to 3 fluctuation cycles.