Innovative events: product launches, innovation and firm performance

In this paper, we shed new light on the links between firm-level innovation and growth. We introduce data that capture a difficult-to-observe aspect of firms' innovative activity – new product/service launches – at scale. We show that our novel measures complement existing innovation metrics. We build a simple framework covering firm-level innovation, launches and revenue productivity. Then, we show positive linkages between past patenting and launches and between launches and performance for a large panel of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK. We go on to explore the roles of age, size, industry and product/service quality in these relationships. A subset of SMEs with high-quality launches explains our results.