In this paper we examine whether and to what extent breakthrough and incremental product innovation is persistent at the firm level. Drawing on a panel database created from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) we find that lagged breakthrough product innovation ‘new to the market’, has a significant and positive influence on firms’ ability to develop current breakthrough innovation, while this is not the case for incremental-product innovation ‘only new to the firm’. Our findings show that the dynamics of innovation persistence differ across types of (product) innovations.
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Clausen et al. (2013) studied this question.