Does Social Capital of Enterprises Influence their Innovativeness? Analysis of Post-Socialist Countries' Experience

Many papers are devoted to the analysis of the factors influencing innovativeness of enterprises. There are two large groups of such factors: external (related to the environment, in which the firm acts) and internal (related to the firm itself). Social capital is often considered by scholars as a factor influencing performance of the organization. Despite this fact, it is paid little attention to social capital's influence on the firm innovativeness. In this paper, we made an attempt to evaluate such influence using the BEEPS' data on postsocialist enterprises. The results of the logistic regression models show that all three hypotheses are confirmed. Social capital influences the innovativeness of enterprises directly and indirectly (the effect of the interaction of social capital and the timescale of production tasks is significant and positive; the effect of the interaction of social capital and successful market reforms is also significant and positive).