Management of innovative resources in an unstable environment and selection of innovative firms

Innovative resources and their management are of key importance for innovation performance and thus for achieving competitive advantages, especially in an unstable period. To a large extent, it results from the risky nature of innovative activities and translates into innovation performance and the processes of selecting companies on the market. The purpose of this paper is to analyse changes in the knowledge resource management, innovation performance and their diversification across Polish manufacturing firms in unstable environment, i.e., during the period of world financial crisis. We study changes in the use of knowledge resources, innovation performance and selection of innovative firms that have introduced innovations within three out of five Polish Community Innovation Survey waves (2004-2014). We analysed 32 types of knowledge resources used by innovative firms. The paper shows that the changes in the use of knowledge resource by innovative firms accompanies changes in their innovation performance and results in a selection process between innovative firms on the regional and macroeconomic level. The strong drop in the use of innovation resources and innovation performance of competing firms accompanied the improvement in innovation performance of the newcomers.