Impact of Korean pro-market reforms on firm innovation strategies

This paper investigates how market-oriented reforms affect firm incentives to innovate. We utilise the market reforms enacted in Korea following the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 as an empirical setting to show why an institution-based view is crucial to understanding the factors that incentivize firms to innovate. Additionally, we draw on the competitive strategy literature to investigate how market reforms - combined with industry competition and firm-specific factors - affect innovation-related investments. Our findings suggest that market reforms positively influence both innovation input and output, but these associations are contingent on firm-specific factors.