Despite the importance of constant product improvement to becoming a sustainable organization, the relationship between different types of innovation and new product development has received little attention. This article contributes to prior research by proposing a necessary condition for successful product development, which increases organizational sustainability. While it has been widely argued that technological innovation is an important factor for new product development, we contribute by illustrating the importance of process and administrative innovation, which changes an organization’s way of doing business. By analyzing survey responses from 2127 Korean firms, we empirically demonstrate that process and administrative innovation increase the likelihood of achieving new product development goals. Our findings also show that innovation-supporting human resource practices such as talent development programs and work autonomy increase the effectiveness of process and administrative innovations. Overall, we suggest that organizations are able to achieve a sustainable presence in the product market when they constantly innovate the way they run themselves. Additionally, in order to manage such innovation, organizations should nurture a creative environment by devising effective, innovation-supporting human resource practices.

As the direction and strategies of new ventures depend on the top management team (TMT)’s stability and continuous efforts, we investigate the relationship between executive turnover and research and development (R&D) investment investment. Furthermore, we assess the moderating role of the founder chief executive officer (CEO)’s prior experiences to show that founders’ experiential knowledge mitigates the adverse side effects of executives’ departure. Our empirical analysis utilizes a large pool of firm-level survey datasets comprising 1897 Korean founder-led ventures. The empirical results show that executive turnover reduces R&D intensity, suggesting that new ventures’ longer-term investments may be affected by the instability of the management team. We also show that the negative effects of executive turnover weaken when the founder CEO has a longer prior work experience, prior business group experience, and founding experience. Our findings show that the founder CEO’s entrepreneurship based on valuable prior experiential knowledge mitigates the negative impact of organizational instability. While the TMT factor is essential for a new venture’s survival, our findings show that the manner in which leaders act should also be considered separately.

A chaebol is a Korean business group with a unique organizational structure in which both ownership and control rights held by a family. As their production accounts for nearly fifty percent of Korea’s GDP and their power in the labor market, it is important to analyze the succession of chaebols, which is closely related to the sustainability of the business. This paper analyzes the six Korean chaebols’ successions to increase our understanding of the processes and outcomes of the family succession. Specifically, we employ the three-circle model, i.e., the ownership, family, and business system, to conduct a comparative case study. Our analysis suggests that succession that involves a large size of succession concentrated to only one successor and restructuring of business portfolio experiences higher post- performance. Also, the level of conflicts in the succession process was not found to have an effect on performance. Overall, our findings imply that the succession is a period available to the company to set a right course of actions for improving competitiveness.