Acceso usuarios
Elena Shakina 
, Ángel Barajas Alonso
This paper tests the behavioral firm theory by examining exogenous economic shocks to explore whetherswitching to an innovative strategy is always reasonable. A quasi-experimental design – difference-in-difference – has been run on 1000 companies for 11 years to explore the consequences of strategic shiftstowards innovations. It is found that companies that introduced innovations do not have any substantialdifferences from those that kept the ‘status quo’. However, those few companies that decided to fol-low a proactive strategy during crisis by introducing new R&D projects outperform their rivals in themedium-term. A nonlinear relation between the decision to switch to an innovative strategy and relatedperformance suggests that returns to scale exist. Only those cases of innovative shifts that enable thegrowth of more than 50% in intangible assets on average and more than 30% in a recession appear to besuccessful and lead to higher performance for companies
