Antecedents of Firm Innovativeness: An Empirical Study of the Propensity and the Capability to Develop NewProducts

New product development is a major field of research. Our paper represents a tentative attempt of appraising the diverse research streams, providing a systematic assessment of empirical studies, and organizing them into a framework covering aspects of new product development and launch.The presented framework is founded on a decision perspective. It allows a comprehensive approach to the topic, overcoming the inconveniences of function-focused or other partial perspectives and offering a viewpoint able to catch interdependences and provide coherence. Four categories have been investigated and for each category, some hypotheses have been tested on a sample of 144 firms. The results show that firm innovativeness is positively influenced by product innovativeness, by the capability of developing a strict relationship with suppliers, by the way in which product design is managed, and by a reactive attitude toward environmental uncertainty. On the bases of these results, four different typologies of innovative firms have been identified