Does Information from the Higher Education and R&D Institutes Improve the Innovation Efficiency of Logistic Firms?

Abstract

The efficiency of logistics innovation is a challenging task for logistics companies competing in rapid environmental changes. It is also essentially crucial for logistics companies to understand the importance of various sources of information to achieve innovation efficiently. Thus, this study measured the innovation efficiency of 72 logistics firms in South Korea by using ‘the sales’ as an output factor, and ‘the number of employees’ and ‘the innovative activity cost’ as an input factor. In particular, this study tested whether the distribution of measured innovation efficiency value differs in terms of the degree of consideration of higher education institutes and research and development (R & D) institutes as sources of information. To investigate the innovation efficiency of Korean logistics firms, we used a combined method of the input-oriented data envelopment analysis (DEA) with constant return to scale and Kruskal Wallis one-way ANOVA (analysis of variance) techniques. The findings in the study suggest that the logistics firms in Korea tend not to seriously consider higher education institutes and R & D institutes as crucial sources of information for achieving their logistics innovation. However, the results show that the innovation efficiency of logistics firms may be low if they completely exclude or do not consider the information sources for their innovation activities. Keywords: Source of Information, Logistic firms, Innovation efficiency nonparametric statistics, Higher education institutes, R&D institutes