Effects of Internationalization on Innovation in the Service Industry: Evidence from Korea

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of internationalization on the product, process and organizational innovations of Korean service firms. Despite the increasing importance of the service sector and the discrepancies in the natures of the manufacturing and service industries, the internationalization-innovation link in the context of service firms has rarely been examined empirically on a large sample. Based on the results of the logistic regressions using the 2006 Korean Innovation Survey data, we found that Korean service firms’ international expansion is significantly and positively associated with their product and organizational innovations. In addition, the magnitude of the estimates in our models revealed that internationalization has a greater impact on product innovation than on process or organizational innovation.

Keywords: Internationalization, Export, Innovation, Service Industry, Korea

JEL Classification: M16, L8, O03