The implications of innovation for human resource strategies

Futures

Volumn 28, Issue 2 SPEC. ISS., 1996, Pages 103-119

  Johnson, Joanne ^a   Baldwin, John R ^a   Diverty, Brent ^a  

^a STATISTICS CANADA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HUMAN RESOURCES; INDUSTRIAL TRAINING; INNOVATION ROLE; LABOUR IMPACT; MANUFACTURING; TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE;

CANADA;

EID: 0030465682     PISSN: 00163287     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/0016-3287(95)00083-6     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. The Economist, 'Technology and unemployment', 11-17 February 1995, page 21.
2. G Bylinsky, 'The digital factory', Fortune, 14 November 1994.
3. The Survey of Manufacturing Technology was conducted by Statistics Canada in March 1989. The survey asked establishments in the manufacturing sector to indicate their use, planned use, or non-use of 22 separate advanced technologies. There are 4200 establishments in the sample, of which 3952, or 94%, responded. Firms' responses were linked to longitudinal panel data back to 1980, taken from the Census of Manufacturers. The longitudinal panel data includes sales of manufactured goods, number of production workers, and the total wage bill of production workers. For a more in-depth exposition of this analysis, refer to J R Baldwin and B Diverty, Technology use and industrial transformation: empirical perspectives', in Tom Courchene (editor), Bell Canada Papers III: Technology, Information and Public Policy (Kingston, John Deutsch Institute for the Study of Economic Policy, Queen's University, 1995).
4. Bylinsky, op cit, reference 2, page 93.
5. These results say nothing about the effects of relative market share and productivity on overall levels of employment. Employment rates cannot be inferred from the rate of change of employment share, since even where the share of employment is decreasing over time, overall employment may be increasing in an industry or economy which is growing.
6. The Innovation and Technology Survey was conducted in 1993 using manufacturing firms. Three types of units were sampled: large plants whose head office is located elsewhere, the corresponding head offices of the plants, and small firms that have both their management and plant located in the same spot. There were 1595 head offices, 1954 large plants and 2180 small firms for a total of 5729 units sampled. The response rate, for the survey as a whole, was 85.5% and ranged from 92.9% in small firms down to 77.7% in the large plants. The same technology use questions from the 1989 Survey of Manufacturing Technology were used in this survey.
7. The GSME survey was conducted in 1992, using firms that grew over the last half of the 1980s. Small and medium-sized firms were defined as having less than 500 employees and less than $100 million in assets in 1984. The sample was drawn from all major sectors, with the exception of public administration. The survey of 2157 firms had a response rate of 69%. The GSME survey was destined to give a broad description of activities, characteristics and strategies followed by a set of generally successful small and medium-sized firms. For a detailed analysis of the survey, please refer to J R Baldwin, W Le C Chandler and T Papailiadis, Strategies for Success, Catalogue No 61-523E (Ottawa, Statistics Canada, 1994). For a more detailed analysis of the relation between innovation and training, please see notes 9, 10 and 11.
8. It has been suggested that when various subjective responses are centred on a particular theme, those responses, when combined using principal component analysis, can reasonably be expected to represent that theme. Principal component analysis creates new variables as weighted averages of the old. These new variables are similar to indexes, like the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The CPI measured general price changes by weighting the price changes of the individual commodities. Innovation principal components are indexes of innovation. They combine responses to individual survey questions. A number of components, or indexes, are calculated for the set of innovation variables. The alternate weighting schemes that are applied to the individual innovation questions - the size and sign attached to each of the variables - in each of the components, identifies different prototypes of the theme, in this case innovation. See A Anderson, A Basilevsky and D Hum, 'Measurement: theory and techniques', in P Rossi, J Wright and A Anderson (editors), Handbook of Survey Research (New York, Academic Press, 1983).
9. J R Baldwin and Joanne Johnson, 'Human capital development and innovation: the case of training in small and medium-sized enterprises', Research Paper Series No 74 (Ottawa, Statistics Canada, 1995a).
10. J R Baldwin and J Johnson 'Business strategies in innovative and non-innovative firms in Canada', Research Paper Series No 73 (Ottawa, Statistics Canada, 1995b).
11. J R Baldwin, B Diverty and J Johnson, 'Success, innovation, technology, and human resource strategies' (Ottawa, Statistics Canada). Prepared for a conference on 'The Effects of Technology and Innovation on Firm Performance and Employment', Washington, 1-2 May 1995.