Barriers to Product Innovations: A Theoretical Knowledge and Research Framework

Abstract

The essential role of product innovations for company’s sustainability and growth leads researchers to explore the scientific literature and provide knowledge that helps the conduction of empirical researches on this topic. The paper brings light to the critical points of the product innovation process that can create obstacles to development of successful innovations. The main purpose of the paper is to investigate, summarize and establish an understanding of the barriers to product innovations. The paper applies “systematic literature review” as a research method to explore theoretical findings of other authors. The systematic literature review collects multiple literature sources and summarizes them to answer the defined in the paper specific research questions. Investigating the research questions, the author of the current paper introduces two groups of barriers to product innovations – general barriers and specific barriers. The paper provides an original and a new aspect of researching the barriers to product innovations. It gives new directions for investigating the barriers to product innovations – exploring the different stages of the product innovation process and seeking for obstacles within them that companies struggle with. The presented systematic literature review supports the construction of specific empirical indicators and variables, also defined in the paper, which researchers can use for conduction of studies in the field of product innovations. The paper also suggests measurement definitions and sample questions to navigate the researchers to formulate proper questionnaires that provide adequate answers.

 Keywords: barriers to product innovations, obstacles, product innovations, empirical indicators, variables, innovation studies, sample questions