Increasing Strategic Competitiveness Through Innovation: The Finance Perspective

With the start of the new millenium, marked by the disruptive power of Internet technologies, it is almost commonly acknowledged that innovative firms grow faster and perform financially better than those who fail to rapidly mobilize their social and financial capital resources to discover newer, more efficient, and ingenious ways of doing business and creating alternative sales venues. Thus, if the term innovation has come to refer to “the process of turning ideas into reality, exploiting windows of opportunities, and capturing value from them” in essence, innovation, then, can be regarded as a beneficial and intrinsically “good” phenomenon. This is true especially for the technology and telecomunications industries according to the Thomson Reuters’ 2015 State of Innovation Report, which were ranked the most innovative industries with 30 % and 13 % of patent filings in 2014, respectively (http://​www.​businessinsider.​com/​most-innovative-industries-2015-5). Evidently though, innovation is not a win-win game for all stakeholders as laid out back in the 1930s by the Schumpeterian “creative destruction” concept portraying a “quasi-Darwinian” and rather pessimistic view of a process that serves mainly capitalistic motivations in the forms of securing monopoly profits and eventually eradicating a wide range of industries. Looking back at the past couple of decades, financial innovation has become one of the most far-reaching types of innovations, in terms of both, scope and its prolonged repurcussions. This chapter discusses the concept of financial innovation as a strategically competitive tool.