Hop to it! The impact of organization type on innovation response time to the COVID-19 crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a changing environment posing many challenges that call for innovative solutions, leading to a changing innovation landscape. We explore particular organizational actors’ innovation response time by analyzing data from a commercial innovation database. Arguing that innovation response time mostly depends on how organizations perceive time, we expect innovative start-ups to be the quickest and universities to be the slowest in responding to the crisis. Controlling for a set of external drivers of structural change, we find support for our hypothesis about start-ups. Contrary to our expectations, universities do not significantly differ in their innovation response time compared with incumbents. To underpin the robustness of our findings, we provide a specification curve analysis. Our results indicate the significance of start-up–corporate collaboration and open innovation, especially in the aftermath of the crisis.