Abstract

RAMON-DANGLA, Remedios  and  CALATRAVA, Cristina Bañón. INTANGIBLE ASSETS STOCK AND BUSINESS PROFITABILITY. THE CASE OF THE SPANISH HOTEL INDUSTRY (2008-2019). Innovar [online]. 2022, vol.32, n.84, pp.25-39.  Epub May 17, 2022. ISSN 0121-5051.  https://doi.org/10.15446/innovar.v32n84.100544.

Business literature has noticeably tried to establish relationships between innovation and business results. In this context, the diversity of conclusions regarding the definitions or measurements of innovation encouraged the development of this study, whose objective was to verify if the stock of intangible assets of Spanish firms in the hotel industry has a significant relationship with profitability (ROA) and to identify whether this business indicator varies depending on firms' size and age. The economic value of the Spanish hotel industry and its need to maintain international competitiveness explain the selection of this sector. As a theoretical framework, we adopted the insights from the resource-based view (RBV), since this approach highlights intangible internal resources as key elements to maintain the competitive advantages of firms belonging to the same sector. With that in mind, we built a data panel (2008-2019) and examined information on the intangible assets of 1,927 hotel companies obtained from the Iberian Balance Sheet Analysis System (SABI) database. We also built an innovation index (II) for each company and each year, studying the relationship of this index with firms' ROA by size and age. Our findings revealed that the II was positively correlated with ROA, especially for older and medium- and large-sized hotels, and that very large-sized hotels had a significant and negative relationship: as companies grow, innovation grows as well, but only to a certain limit.

Keywords : Intangible assets; hotel firms; innovation; economic profitability; ROA.

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