Perception of innovation barriers by successful and unsuccessful innovators in emerging economies

Understanding innovation barriers is critical for innovation policy to design better incentives to innovation. This study explores the factors that influence the perception of innovation barriers in two emerging economies, Mexico and Turkey. The analysis integrates three sources of data into a comprehensive database. For Mexico, we use data from the ESIDET, 2010; for Turkey, we use data from TurkStat, 2010; while institutional country context indicators were gathered from a set of international databases. Our results suggest that firm and context characteristics matter as determinants of a firm’s perception of innovation barriers, while there are differences between successful innovators and unsuccessful innovators. This paper contributes to the empirical and theoretical debate on innovation barriers through the analysis of how successful and unsuccessful innovators in two emerging economies perceive innovation barriers. It also contributes to the discussion on the role of the institutional context on innovation barriers. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.