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      The impact of persistent innovation on Australian firm growth

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            Abstract

            This paper assesses the contribution of innovation persistence to surviving Australian firm growth performance over the period 2007–08 to 2013–14 with the added advantages that new firms, micro-sized firms and all industry sectors are included in our analysis. Over this period, firms with high sales and/or employment growth accounted for the majority of aggregate economic and employment growth in Australia, which is consistent with similar studies in other countries. Using a randomized, stratified sample from a firm population-level database that links administrative, tax and survey data, we created a matched, balanced sample of surviving firms to show that short-term persistent innovators (particularly young SMEs) significantly outgrow their less persistent and non-innovator counterparts in terms of sales, value added, employment and profit growth. Persistent innovators are more likely to be high-growth firms and more likely to introduce multiple types of innovation that are more novel. Our findings suggest that broad-based innovation policies may support successive waves of high-growth firms that help to sustain economic and employment growth in Australia.

            Content

            Author and article information

            Journal
            10.2307/j50022063
            prometheus
            Prometheus
            Pluto Journals
            0810-9028
            1470-1030
            1 September 2021
            : 37
            : 3 ( doiID: 10.13169/prometheus.37.issue-3 )
            : 241-258
            Affiliations
            [ a ]Office of the Chief Economist, Australian Government Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, Canberra
            [ b ]Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra
            Author notes
            Article
            prometheus.37.3.0241
            10.13169/prometheus.37.3.0241
            6fec3c5b-50bb-4159-9b89-e482dd5533b6
            © 2021 Pluto Journals

            All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

            History
            Custom metadata
            eng

            Computer science,Arts,Social & Behavioral Sciences,Law,History,Economics

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