Innovation and Asymmetric Cost Behavior

From a manager’s rational decision-making perspective, cost stickiness is caused by holding surplus resources rather than disposing of them immediately and can be applied as part of the information on expected future sales rebounds. This paper investigates how innovation, as a key component of business strategy, changes cost behavior. Innovation is closely tied to the long-term survival of an enterprise and plays an important role in creating sustainable competitive advantage and superior performance. We hypothesized that the resource retention rate will change according to the managers’ aim and the expectation over the innovation process. Using Korean manufacturing firm data from the Korean Innovation Survey, we provide evidence that firms implementing innovation exhibit greater cost stickiness than those that do not. Furthermore, the reservation of resources occurred mainly in a pessimistic situation, which confirms that the company’s innovation strategy aims to overcome the unfavorable current situation of the company. We also verified the different resource commitment decisions that depends on strategic differences by product and process innovation. The findings of the study help to understand how resource allocation is driven by managers’ decisions in the context of each type of innovation.