Corporate innovation strategies: an exploratory study of innovation processes, domains and decision drivers in the beauty industry.

This thesis investigates corporate innovation strategies in large firms, with a particular focus on the processes, domains, and decision drivers that determine strategic choices: the work begins with a theoretical analysis of how companies manage innovation, exploring the relationship between competences, knowledge, and dynamic capabilities, and how these factors influence the selection between internal development, structured partnerships, and open innovation models. The literature review highlights that the appropriate innovation process depends on the strategic importance of innovation pursued, its proximity to the firm’s core business & knowledge field, and the level of technological volatility and uncertainty in the environment. The second step is to check the validity of these findings for the chosen industry: the empirical section focuses indeed on the beauty industry, one of the most dynamic and innovation-driven sectors. The study adopts an exploratory approach based on the analysis of 340 innovation-related press releases published between 2014 and 2025 by five leading beauty companies: L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, Shiseido, Beiersdorf, and Coty. Press releases were selected as the main data source because they provide direct insights into corporate strategies and are consistent and comparable across companies and time and, to classify them, a hybrid human-supervised AI method was developed, combining the efficiency of artificial intelligence with the interpretative accuracy of human validation, ensuring both scalability and reliability. The results show that beauty companies tend to follow structured and differentiated innovation strategies depending on the knowledge domain, but that this is always influenced by their specific strategic focus. Core innovations, such as those related to ingredients, are predominantly developed internally, as they pertain to the core knowledge domain of beauty companies and to protect intellectual property and strengthen long-term competitiveness. Conversely, sustainability and digitalization initiatives are mostly pursued through strategic partnerships and open innovation, allowing companies to access complementary capabilities. Venture capital operations and start-up acquisitions are closely linked to highly volatile and uncertain domains, confirming that external collaboration is increasingly used as a strategic mean to keep up with technological change. The third chapter provides qualitative support to these trends through an interview with a manager of innovation at L’Oréal: the discussion offered concrete evidence of how firms distinguish between domains that are developed in-house, that are typically those tightly connected to core scientific and technological competences, and those managed externally through partnerships or acquisitions, particularly when the knowledge field is fast-evolving or insufficiently developed internally. Overall, the study shows how large beauty corporations act as orchestrators of innovation ecosystems, combining strong internal R&D capabilities with structured collaborations and open innovation initiatives, that are leveraged depending on the strategic importance, the core business relatedness and the volatility of the domain.