Searching for Dependencies between Business Strategies and Innovation Outputs in Manufacturing: An Analysis Based on CIS

Abstract

A modern enterprise can use changes in its environment as an opportunity to create new products and services, constituting a competitive advantage. This ability is in turn determined by its adopted business strategy. The aim of this study is an attempt to find the relationship between business strategies used in industrial enterprises and their effects in the form of various types of innovations. Our research covered innovative manufacturing companies from selected EU member states and Turkey. Two research hypotheses were formulated: H1: The importance of business strategies to innovative companies is different between countries. H2: The clusters identified are not homogeneous in terms of the innovation outputs achieved by the companies. Our analyses are based on data derived from the CIS 2018 for the period of 2016–2018. To verify these hypotheses, statistical methods were used, including a cluster analysis. The results of the analysis indicate that the manufacturing companies in the surveyed countries apply various combinations of business strategies, which may translate into results in terms of innovation. Business process innovations are dominated by new or improved methods for producing goods or providing services.

1. Introduction

An important factor in maintaining a competitive advantage and efficiency in a knowledge-based economy is the ability to introduce innovations constantly. Considering the idea of sustainable development which has been discussed globally, nowadays innovations must have at least a neutral impact on the environment and society. The ability to create innovation is in turn determined by the business strategy adopted by an enterprise. Such a strategy, involving long-term planning and actions aimed at development, is primarily oriented towards the introduction of innovations that enable the dynamic development of a company.

The innovative process in enterprises is characterized by specific features. Regardless of the adopted innovation implementation model, it is required to acquire skills and establish relationships with the environment [1]. An innovative enterprise as a learning organization, i.e., reacting to changes in its environment, can achieve business goals, including, for example, changes in its market position as well as increases in profit or the company’s value [2]. A modern enterprise can use these changes as an opportunity to create new products and/or services which constitute a competitive advantage. The term “an innovative enterprise” refers to a company that has introduced at least one product or process innovation in an analyzed period, i.e., a new or significantly improved product or process for the surveyed enterprise. Such innovative companies are characterized by their ability to search for new ideas, solutions, concepts, etc., and to implement them through economic activity. The activity and level of innovation of enterprises depend on their adopted business strategy. Our paper reveals the relationship between business strategies used by innovative industrial enterprises and the innovations generated by them. It aims to determine which strategies create which types of innovation. Our research may be the first step in an attempt to explain the dependencies between business strategies and innovation outputs. Thus, it can be considered as a starting point to fill the research gap in the literature on this subject.

Our analysis is based on data derived from the CIS 2018 [3]. Two research hypotheses result directly from the aim of the study:

Hypothesis 1:

The importance of business strategies to innovative firms is different between countries.

Hypothesis 2:

The clusters identified are not homogeneous in terms of the innovation outputs achieved by the companies.

Innovativeness allows companies to improve their competitive position in the market. Various business strategies implemented by companies, depending on their needs and market perspectives, could result in different types of innovation, as the effect of innovativeness. Most often this comprises innovation in products and in processes.

2. Literature Review

2.1. Innovation Typology and Innovation Activity

While considering the search for relationships between business strategies and the results of innovation in production, it should be emphasized that currently all economic processes show a strong relationship with new technologies and innovations. One can even say that they are interdependent. In addition, we must find an answer to the frequently asked question: what kind of innovation or technology should be used in an enterprise’s economic and social life in order to generate an appropriate rate of return?

Definitions of innovation can be found in the works by [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. Some authors claim that innovation is the creation of a new idea and its implementation in a new product, process, or service, which may result in the dynamic growth of the national economy and employment rates, as well as the creation of pure profit for the innovative business enterprise [14]. In general, the concept of “innovation” is quite a complex and multifaceted subject in research, but there is still no definition of innovation that has been generally accepted in science [15]. There are several main ways to analyze this term. Schumpeter, who may be called the father of the theory of innovation in the economy generally, considered innovations as technological changes of an economic nature, as the use of newly formed associations of productive forces to solve business problems [16]. According to Twiss, innovation is a process that contains science, technology, economics, and management, as it is working out a new way to conduct an enterprise and extends from the appearance of the idea to its commercialization in terms of production, exchange, and consumption [17].

Innovation, as a process, is long and cumulative way of performing a lot of organizational steps, starting from the phase of generating a new idea to its implementation phase. Through the implementation process, a new idea is developed and commercialized into a new marketable product or a new process with a subsequent cost reduction and increased productivity [14].

There are many discussions and concerns on how innovation should be measured at each stage. Some authors, such the authors of [18,19], suggest measuring new and improved products as the output of innovation, which is considered new product development. West et al. [20] and Akgün et al. [21] propose measuring improvements in processes and methods, while Czarnitzki and Kraft [22] propose measuring the market success of innovation, suggesting the “ratio of innovative product sold in the market to total sales”. Considering market aspects, Elenkov and Manev [19] discuss indicators of the success of new products on the market and indicate that the rate of success of new products on the market may be very vulnerable and never reach 100%.

Some authors refer to patent applications for innovation [23,24]; however, Makri and Scandura [25] suggest measuring the importance of patents in terms of patent citations. It is also worth mentioning the works by [26,27,28,29,30,31] which develop the concept of output performance, including financial, temporal, market, and product-related factors.

Innovativeness is the condition of having a competitive advantage. However, with a broader perception of innovation, we can see that the combination of knowledge is essential for the creation of new products, ideas, and technologies [32,33,34,35,36]. The process of commercializing innovation has been categorized by [37] and includes idea generation, initial application, feasibility determination, and implications. Another important aspect of organizational innovation is that it should be adapted to both the needs of the organization and the market.

As global competition rises and product life cycles shorten, the pressure to innovate is growing. Achieving low costs together with high quality is no longer a guarantee for success and earning a lot of money [38]. Most innovation projects fail systematically due to being managed as raw technology projects. The internal and centralized approach to R&D is becoming obsolete in most organizations. More open forms of innovation are required in which internal and external ideas are leveraged across the organization [39].

Currently, there has been a focus on organizational resources and capabilities as the main sources of competitive advantage. In the past, companies developed strategies to minimize product costs by optimally combining land, labor, and capital. In the second part of the 20th century, a fourth dimension, knowledge, was added to these three economic inputs. All scientific, technological, organizational, financial, and commercial steps which lead to, or are intended to lead to, the implementation of innovations are defined as innovation activities [40].

2.2. Oslo Manual and CIS 2018—How Should Innovation Activity Be Measured?

The fourth edition of the Oslo Manual is an international source strongly committed to creating a database supporting innovation investments. The 2018 edition of the Oslo Manual includes enhanced guidance to reflect changing user interests and accumulated practical experience. The manual measures scientific, technological, and innovation activities. Better measurements of innovation as well as its impact on economic growth and sustainable competitive advantage are key to coordinating innovation policies across countries [40]. The choice of countries analyzed in our paper was determined by the availability of data in the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) 2018 [3].

The CIS is the reference survey on innovation in enterprises. It has been the reference for information on business innovation in the EU since 1992. After the fourth revision of the Oslo Manual in 2018, the CIS underwent a substantial change. (Revision efforts were directed to improve the quality of the CIS data as well as to increase the efficiency of data production; to take account of major aspects of the revision of the Oslo Manual; to increase policy relevance of the CIS informative content; and to increase the usability of the statistical outputs of the survey [41]). The CIS 2018 was carried out in the following countries: EU member states, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, Turkey, Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro, but data for the last three countries are not disseminated in Eurobase. An innovation for CIS data collection means a new or improved product or process (or a combination thereof) that differs significantly from the entity’s previous products or processes and that has been made available to potential users (as a product) or brought into use by the entity (as a process) [3]. The CIS is designed to provide information on the innovativeness of business economy sectors. It analyzes innovation outcomes which depend on enterprises’ business strategies. Innovation activity is measured by inputs and outputs.

2.3. Business Strategy and Innovation—Input and Output towards Creating Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Strategy is a key element in a company’s long-term competitive advantage. Andrews [42] was one of the first theorists who showed the differences between a business strategy and a corporate strategy, stressing that a strategy should be seen as a conscientious plan to align the enterprise with opportunities and threats posed by its environment. Business strategy is a wide and diverse field. It can be traditional or innovative [43]. It is the outcome of decisions with respect to an enterprise’s environment, structure, and processes [44]. While there are a lot of papers concerning the relationship between innovation and strategy in efforts to create a sustainable competitive advantage [45,46,47,48,49,50], there are still few works exploring how enterprises with different strategic orientations create product and process innovation [45,51] or how firms with different strategic orientations manage innovative practices [52]. The study of Zahra and Covin [53] emphasizes the importance of companies’ performance. Ritter and Gemünden [54] draw attention to technological and network competence in innovation. Considering business models, business strategies, and innovation, Teece [55] concludes that a business strategy is a narrower concept than a business model. This means that an analysis of the link between a strategy and business model is needed to protect a sustainable competitive advantage. Most often, non-innovative enterprises do not make significant changes in the business model [56]. Badiru [57] analyzes innovation and innovative activity in the form of a chosen strategy as strategies for managing, allocating, and synchronizing the organization’s technological tools, manpower resources, and work processes to achieve a given result in an efficient and targeted manner.

As for innovation activity in manufacturing, inputs are related to a favorable innovation environment and outputs are defined as the results. The results mean innovation. In our work, a strategy is the input, and innovation is the output (Figure 1). The input for innovation activity in manufacturing is the innovation strategy, and the output is the product and process innovation—as the effect of one of ten innovation strategies [3,40]: improving existing goods or services (1), introducing entirely new goods or services (2), reaching out to new customer groups (3), customer-specific solutions (4), low-price strategies (5), high-quality strategies (6), a broad range of goods and services (7), key goods and services (8), satisfying established customer groups (9), standardized goods or services (10).

Our paper considers an innovation strategy as a type of business strategy. An innovation strategy concerns innovative processes inside and outside the entity. The separation of this strategy is important for all possible levels of the enterprise strategy. At the company level, the innovation strategy concerns the decisions about setting out the strategic orientation of the entity and determining its development policy [58]. Innovations are often considered not only as a type of strategy, but also as the most important element of the strategy of all enterprises, regardless of the scale and scope of their operations.

The input business strategy is given by the enterprise’s evaluation of its cost of production compared to that of its competitors. However, innovation also requires a human resource strategy, financial strategy, etc. [59]. Nowadays, all economic processes are closely related to innovations, and a new breed of innovation—open innovation—has become a managerial imperative. Open innovations may allow for the creation not only of new products and processes, but also of new complementary links in the value chain [43]. Open innovation is a collaborative model that enhances innovation. Considering that the innovation ecosystem is characterized by numerous interactions between its various components, it should be emphasized that the innovation input has a significant and positive impact on countries’ innovation output [60]. Researchers who focus on innovation ecosystems and sustainability point out that participating in an innovation ecosystem brings benefits to the entities involved [61]. Including R&D and innovation activities is particularly important for small- and medium-sized enterprises, as these strategies are crucial for increasing the company’s productivity, competitiveness, and ultimately survival [62].

The multifaceted nature and complexity of innovativeness and innovative activity as a result of many social, economic, and spatial processes and phenomena mean that research in terms of the importance of innovation for the development of enterprises is a complex problem. Among theoreticians and practitioners dealing with this subject, there is an agreement that innovation cannot be measured with one or more indicators, thus the important research problem is the selection of methods and measures for assessing innovation. This applies to both analyses on a global scale and analyses limited by territory, e.g., to the area of the European Union. Moreover, as the authors of this study wish to point out, the measurement and evaluation of the operation of innovative strategies are an extremely difficult process to grasp and study. Additionally, it is presumed that, according to the authors’ best knowledge, the process of the impact of innovative strategies on the activities of enterprises has not been examined before.

3. Materials and Methods

The aim of this analysis was to find and compare the role of business strategies used by innovative companies in manufacturing in selected countries, i.e., the EU member states and Turkey. The choice of countries was determined by the availability of data in the CIS 2018. The first and only survey in which the importance of 10 business strategies to the economic performance of enterprises was examined. These 10 business strategies have been already mentioned in the previous section. Although CIS 2018 covers more countries, information on the importance of the strategies was only available for 22 of them.

Data used for our research are based on the 3-year reference period of 2016–2018. An enterprise is considered as innovative if during the reference period it successfully introduced a product or process innovation, had ongoing innovation activities, abandoned innovation activities, had completed but not yet introduced the innovation, or was engaged in in-house R&D or R&D contracted out. CIS 2018 includes the most recent changes recommended by the latest Oslo Manual 4th Edition which redefined the concept of innovation by distinguishing between only two types of innovation: ‘product’ and ‘business process’ (formerly split into process, organizational, and marketing innovations) [40]. Initially, an attempt was made to analyze strategies in individual industries, including industries with different innovation intensities. Unfortunately, due to the significant lack of data, this was abandoned.

Two research hypotheses were formulated:

Hypothesis 1:

The importance of business strategies to innovative firms is different between countries.

Hypothesis 2:

The clusters identified are not homogeneous in terms of the innovation outputs achieved by the companies.

To verify the hypotheses, statistical methods were applied, including Ward’s cluster analysis.

4. Results

Companies may compete in different ways, i.e., focusing on price or quality, shaping the market, reacting to competition, getting involved in high-risk and high-reward activities versus low-risk activities, entering new or remaining with old stable partnerships, implementing new or modernized business models, focusing on a single product market, or serving multiple markets simultaneously. The strategies used or their combination determine the quantity, type, and quality of innovations generated in a company. Regarding the latter, for example, firms that serve multiple markets are more likely to have greater opportunities and needs for innovations than those that serve a single product market. Focusing on quality should develop new-to-market product innovations, etc. [40].

The results of the analysis show that the high importance of selected business strategies differs across countries (Figure 2). It appears that the most important strategies for innovation activity in manufacturing and its revenues are those focused on improving existing goods or services, attaining high-quality goods or services, and satisfying established customer groups. An outlier in most cases is Denmark. Considering the average percentage of the companies for which the importance of these strategies was high, we may suppose that innovative manufacturing enterprises are rather focused on incremental innovations, which confirms the trends observed in the literature [63]. Quality-focused firms are more likely to develop new-to-market product innovations [40]. The least important for innovation activity were business strategies focused on low-cost, standardized key goods and/or services that put a greater emphasis on highly efficient processes. A large variation in the responses was registered for strategies focused on incremental and radical product innovations and established customer groups.

The analysis of the CIS 2018 results shows that business process innovations represent most of the outputs of innovation activities (58% for innovation core activities and 55% for manufacturing). Business process innovations were dominated by new or improved methods for producing goods or providing services (66% of enterprises introduced process innovations); new methods of organizing work responsibility, decision making, or human resource management (50%); and new or improved methods for information processing or communication (50%). The lowest was the share of companies that had made changes in logistics (less than 30%). Product innovations were mostly new to these companies. New or significantly improved products that were new to the market were generated by one third of the innovative enterprises that had introduced at least one new or significantly improved product in manufacturing. Unfortunately, the lack of differentiation between new and improved products did not allow us to conduct an analysis of radical and incremental innovations.

According to the definition adopted in the CIS 2018, a company recognized as innovative did not have to introduce any innovation between 2016 and 2018. It was sufficient that it had incurred expenditures or conducted in-house research and development or contracted out. It means that the results of implemented business strategies and thus the innovative activities may appear with a delay and some of the outputs are not included in the current survey.

The analysis of the importance of individual strategies in innovative industrial companies shows significant variation in the countries studied, which may be conditioned in part by the different structure of their manufacturing, the degree of technological advancement of the sectors, the innovation policy implemented, etc. Unfortunately, given the data on the role of strategies for one period for a small number of countries, it is not possible to confirm or exclude their impact on the type and volume of innovations generated. We can only look for dependencies.

Table 1. Five countries with the highest and the lowest importance of selected strategies to the economic performance of enterprises (in descending order).

Strategy	Business Sectors		Manufacturing
	Average Importance High and Medium	Average Importance Low and None	Average Importance High and Medium	Average Importance Low and None
Focus on improving existing goods or services	Malta, Portugal, Slovakia, Cyprus, Greece	Denmark, Czechia, Bulgaria, Estonia, France	Greece, Portugal, Malta, Cyprus, Romania	Denmark, France Czechia, Bulgaria, Estonia
Focus on introducing entirely new goods or services	Portugal, Slovenia, Turkey, Malta, Poland	Germany, Sweden, Czechia, Estonia Spain	Slovenia, Turkey, Portugal, Poland, Cyprus	Sweden. Germany, Czechia, Spain, France
Focus on reaching out to new customer groups	Turkey, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Greece	Denmark, Italy Sweden, Germany, France	Turkey, Poland Portugal, Lithuania, Cyprus	Italy, Denmark Sweden, Germany, Bulgaria
Focus on customer specific solution	Turkey, Slovenia Greece, Portugal, Germany,	Denmark, Czechia, Bulgaria, Sweden, France	Slovenia Turkey, Portugal, Estonia, Greece	Denmark, Bulgaria, Czechia, Sweden, Romania
Focus on low-price	Turkey, Poland, France, Luxembourg, Slovenia	Sweden, Estonia Germany, Czechia, Slovakia	Turkey, Poland, Romania, Cyprus, Luxembourg	Sweden, Estonia, Germany, Czechia, Spain
Focus on high quality	Portugal, Cyprus, Greece, Slovenia, Poland	Denmark, Bulgaria, Czechia, Luxembourg, Spain	Cyprus, Slovenia, Portugal, Greece, Poland	Denmark, Bulgaria, France, Romania, Spain
Focus on a broad range of goods and services	Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Estonia	Sweden, Czechia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, France	Turkey, Portugal, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia	Sweden, Czechia, Slovakia, Bulgaria France
Focus on key goods and services	Turkey, Hungary, Croatia, Romania, Cyprus	Czechia, France, Portugal, Slovenia, Luxembourg	Turkey, Croatia, Cyprus, Hungary, Romania	France, Luxembourg, Sweden, Czechia, Portugal
Focus on satisfying established customer groups	Cyprus, Portugal, Poland, Greece, Turkey	Denmark, Bulgaria Spain, Germany, Czechia	Cyprus, Portugal, Poland, Greece, Slovenia	Denmark, Bulgaria, Spain, Germany, France
Focus on standardized goods or services	Turkey, Latvia, Poland, Croatia, Estonia	France, Sweden, Greece, Germany, Luxembourg	Turkey, Latvia, Poland, Estonia, Croatia	France, Germany, Sweden, Greece, Luxembourg

Source: own elaboration based on [3].

presents a comparison of countries with the highest and the lowest ratings of importance for the selected strategies to the economic performance of innovating enterprises in manufacturing. For comparative purposes, manufacturing was compared with business sectors/innovation core activities (NACE Rev. 2 sections and divisions B-C-D-E-46-H-J-K-71-72-73). The results of the analysis conducted from this perspective indicate that the importance of the strategy in the countries analyzed remains similar in the business sector and in manufacturing. Completely different group compositions occurred only for strategies focused on a broad range of goods and services ranked as being of high or medium importance. This may be determined by the share of services in the production structure of selected countries. Regarding the group of countries that ranked strategies focused on improving existing goods or services as being of high and medium importance, one expects that they would emphasize the greater importance of incremental innovations focused on product performance [64]. In the case of strategies focused on introducing entirely new goods or services that are rather radical or even disruptive, more risky innovations can be expected. Firms focused on reaching new customer groups may introduce radical and innovative business models. Firms focused on customer-specific solutions will probably generate product performance innovations, and firms looking for production efficiency will likely implement strategies focused on low-price business strategies. New-to-market products are seen as the result of a strategy focused on quality. We may expect to see them in countries for which such strategies are important. Companies that focus on key goods and services are probably implementing incremental changes in existing goods and services rather than radical changes in the form of new products. Ranking a strategy focused on satisfying established customer groups as highly important may suggest innovations in the field of experience (service, channel, customer engagement, [64]). However, the final outputs of innovation may depend on the mix of business strategies employed by enterprises.

The next step was the cluster analysis, carried out using hierarchical clustering via Ward’s method. The aim of this analysis was to identify country profiles based on the innovation strategies used by their companies. Ward’s method is considered very effective for creating homogeneous clusters [65]. Clusters are combined so that the within-group variance is as small as possible. The countries are clustered according to the high importance of the 10 aforementioned CIS 2018 business strategies for innovative enterprises active in manufacturing (Figure 1). As a result, 22 countries are divided into four groups (Figure 3). Italy is omitted due to numerous data gaps. The largest group consists of 11 countries while the least numerous group includes one country, i.e., Denmark, which could in principle be treated as an outlier. The differences among groups were analyzed using the mean values of the variables (Figure 4).

The first group consists of one country, Denmark, which is characterized by the highest percentage of innovative firms in manufacturing, indicating it highly valued strategies focused on low prices and high quality and least valued strategies introducing entirely new goods or services. The second cluster comprises three countries, Cyprus, Slovenia, and Turkey, with the highest percentage of companies assigning high importance to all of the strategies apart from the strategy focused on low price and on key goods and services. Cyprus turned out to be the country with the highest share of enterprises that introduced business process and product innovations not only in its cluster, but also among all countries which participated in the CIS. The lowest scores in the group were achieved by Turkey. The most numerous cluster consisted of eleven countries with a medium percentage of firms assigning high importance to all of the selected strategies. This cluster could be divided into two sub-clusters. The first one comprises Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Greece, Portugal, and Luxembourg, the second one includes Croatia, Hungary, Malta, Slovakia, and Romania. In the first sub-cluster, the highest shares of enterprises that introduced both product and process innovations were recorded in Estonia and Greece, and the lowest were recorded in Poland. Among the countries from the second sub-cluster, the leader was Croatia. The lowest shares were recorded for Romania. The last cluster comprises Bulgaria, Czechia, Germany, Spain, France, Lithuania, and Sweden. These are countries where the lowest percentage of innovative enterprises in manufacturing reported assigning high importance to all of the selected strategies in terms of their economic performance. Despite the low-rated importance of the selected strategies for economic performance, it is in this group of countries that high shares of firms that have introduced both types of innovation were recorded. The exceptions were Bulgaria and Spain. In the example of this group of countries, it may be presumed that innovation outputs are influenced more by innovation potential than by the implemented strategies. For comparison, Figure 5 shows the full group of the countries for which the innovation data were available.

Among business process innovations, changes in production methods are the most common. In only two countries (Germany and Cyprus) was the percentage of firms that had introduced new or improved methods for producing goods or services not the highest among the business process innovations. In Germany, more companies were focused on organizing work responsibility, decision making, human resources management, and methods for information processing or communication. In the case of Cyprus, these were innovations in logistics, information processing, or communication. Apart from Cyprus, companies located in Greece, Croatia, and Italy declared they had most frequently implemented innovations in logistics. Greece, in turn, was the country where business process innovations of all types were implemented most frequently. New or significantly improved products that were new to the market were introduced more frequently by enterprises from France, Belgium, Austria, Finland, and Norway.

5. Conclusions

Companies seek to improve their competitive position in the market. They can achieve this in different ways. One of them is to innovate, which is especially important in the era of the knowledge economy. Their efforts can target different types of innovation, depending on their needs and market perspectives. Various business strategies implemented by companies and combinations of them may serve this purpose.

Considering innovation activity in the manufacturing sector, inputs are related to a favorable innovation environment and outputs are defined as the results. Innovative activity is influenced by open innovation. In manufacturing, the input means the innovation strategy, and the output means product and process innovations—as the effect of one of 10 innovation strategies. The purpose of searching for the relationship between the innovation strategy and product or process innovations, as an output in production, is to create a sustainable competitive advantage in enterprises. The reference survey on innovation in enterprises is the Community Innovation Survey [3].

The results of the analysis carried out confirmed that the importance of individual business strategies used in innovative enterprises in manufacturing differs in individual countries. It may be noted that the most important strategies for innovation activity and its revenues are those focused on improving existing goods or services, attaining high-quality goods or services, and satisfying established customer groups. This may suggest that enterprises are focused rather on incremental innovations. This is confirmed by the data on the effects of innovative activity, according to which most product innovations are new for the company and not for the market. In terms of business process innovations, in turn, innovations in the production and service provision processes are dominant. As a result of the cluster analysis used, groups of countries with a similar importance of individual strategies were identified. Denmark turned out to be the definite outlier. Despite common features, the identified clusters are not homogeneous in terms of the achieved innovation outputs. The effects of the strategy were determined by many factors, including those within it, i.e., the combination of strategies, period of application, or type of industry, as well as outside it, i.e., the broadly understood innovation environment.

Unfortunately, the data on which the analysis is based cover only one period, which is a significant limitation for making inferences. Due to numerous data gaps, it was also not possible to analyze the significance of individual strategies for innovation outputs at the industry level. The authors are aware that inferring the effects of innovation based solely on business strategies, or their combination, is not fully justified. However, it is treated as a starting point for subsequent analyses which would also consider other determinants of innovation. The level and type of innovation generated within the identified clusters is not homogeneous. It may be influenced by other factors already mentioned, such as production structure, country-specific features, the level of human capital, R&D expenditures, or the quality of the innovative environment. As there have not been previous studies on our exact topic, we are unable to compare the results of our analysis to the results of previous studies, which can also be considered as a significant limitation. The consideration of all determinants over a longer period would undoubtedly improve the quality of our analysis. The authors are aware of this paper’s limitations; therefore, they treat this analysis as a kind of starting point for further, more detailed research.