Innovation profiles in colombian metalworking companies according to their R&D investment and export activity
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Abstract
This article aims to characterize the innovation profiles of Colombian metalworking firms according to their research and development investment and export activity during 2017–2018. An exploratory descriptive study is conducted through a secondary analysis of clustering results reported in a previous investigation based on the Ninth Survey of Technological Development and Innovation (EDIT IX). The original study characterizes 743 metalworking firms and subsequently segments a subset comprising innovative and potentially innovative firms. Its procedure uses the K-means algorithm and incorporates workforce participation, educational attainment, external collaboration, and interdisciplinary teams alongside investment and exports. The published results describe three profiles: firms with neither research and development investment nor interdisciplinary teams; firms with research and development investment but no exports; and firms combining research and development investment with export activity. These profiles reveal distinct configurations of resources and participation in foreign markets, without establishing a maturity sequence or a causal relationship between their characteristics. The study concludes that segmentation complements the survey’s innovation categories and provides a basis for differentiated assessments of firms. Interpretation is limited by the normalization choices, the treatment of zero values, and the absence of independent validation of the clustering in the present study.
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