Capacidad de absorción e innovación en empresas industriales manufactureras en Uruguay

The innovation that companies make allow them to respond to market challenges, obtain sustainable competitive advantages over time and promote economic growth. The objective of this research is to determine if absorption capacity increases the probability that a company will be innovative. For this, different logit models were applied to the micro-data of the Survey of Innovation Activities of Uruguayan industrial manufacturing companies. The results allow us to conclude that absorption capacity is an important element to explain the probability that a firm is innovative. In this sense, the existence of formal R&D units in the firm and the magnitude of the ratio between the employees engaged in R&D tasks over the total number of firm employees have an impact on this.