IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wsi/ijimxx/v25y2021i01ns1363919621500109.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do Directors’ Attributes Influence Innovation? Empirical Evidence From France

Author

Listed:
  • MERIAM ATTIA

    (Unity “Montpellier Research in Management” MRM, University of Montpellier, France2“Corporate Governance, Applied Finance and Auditing” GEF2A Lab, High Institute of Management, University of Tunis, Tunisia)

  • OUIDAD YOUSFI

    (Montpellier Research in Management MRM, University of Montpellier, France)

  • NADIA LOUKIL

    (ISG, Bizerta, University of Carthage, Tunisia5Unity “Finance, Comptabilité et Fiscalité” FSEG de Tunis, University of Tunis-El Manar, Tunisia)

  • ABDELWAHED OMRI

    (Corporate Governance, Applied Finance and Auditing GEF2A, High Institute of Management, University of Tunis, Tunisia)

Abstract

The main aim of the current paper is to analyse how the directors’ characteristics could influence innovation. We study specifically the effect of demographic attributes, such as age, gender, nationality, educational degree and academic background on innovation. Innovation is measured by (1) the firm’s ability to engender innovation in things such as new or improved product/process and the number of patents and (2) innovation expenditures, like, for example, R&D spending on innovative projects and the number of scientists and experts per R&D teams. This study is conducted on the firms listed on SBF120 index between 2002 and 2013. The SBF120 index consists of the 120 largest capitalisations listed on the French Stock Exchange market (SBF: Société des Bourses Françaises). It provides the following results. First, the presence of women on the board positively influences product innovations while the presence of independent directors fosters the number of patents and process innovations. Secondly, highly educated directors can better understand complex decisions and absorb new ideas and technologies, which increase innovative products. Regarding the academic degree, we highlight that business educated directors seem to marginalise innovation investments as they are more likely to focus on activities with short-term financial returns. Then, directors of different ethnic, cultural backgrounds and different nationalities seem to stimulate a firm to improve or develop new products. Moreover, older directors are less risk-tolerant than younger ones: they invest less in risky R&D investments. By looking at the impact of various types of directors’ characteristics on innovation, and by taking into account various types of innovation; this paper brings practical insights to board structures issues. This paper contributes to the debate on the urgent need to increase the firms’ capacity to appoint on board individuals displaying diverse types of knowledge, abilities, skills and networking that could drive more innovations.

Suggested Citation

  • Meriam Attia & Ouidad Yousfi & Nadia Loukil & Abdelwahed Omri, 2021. "Do Directors’ Attributes Influence Innovation? Empirical Evidence From France," International Journal of Innovation Management (ijim), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 25(01), pages 1-37, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:wsi:ijimxx:v:25:y:2021:i:01:n:s1363919621500109
    DOI: 10.1142/S1363919621500109
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S1363919621500109
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1142/S1363919621500109?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Shi, Chunling & Sun, Yaodong & Lyu, Jia, 2023. "D&O insurance, technology independent directors, and R&D investment," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 89(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wsi:ijimxx:v:25:y:2021:i:01:n:s1363919621500109. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tai Tone Lim (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.worldscinet.com/ijim/ijim.shtml .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.