Central American Business Groups, Innovation, and Institutional Conditions

Abstract

This chapter focuses on an important dimension of business groups’ strategies that has so far received only limited attention: their technological innovation activities. This dimension is indeed relevant to an understanding of the dynamics of the business sector in Central American countries. In fact, while there exist several studies focusing on the financial and economic performance of groups in emerging economies, much less is known about their innovative strategies, that is, how groups organize their technological and business activities and what makes them more (or less) successful than independent enterprises (Khanna & Yafeh, 2007; Colpan et al., 2010; Carney et al., 2011).