Going Deeper into SMEs’ Innovation Capacity: An Empirical Exploration of Innovation Capacity Factors

Antoine Pierre and Anne-Sophie Fernandez

Journal of Innovation Economics, 2018, vol. n° 25, issue 1, 139-181

Abstract: This study explores innovation capacity in the specific context of SMEs. Innovation capacity is particularly hard to define in SMEs, as most of their innovative activities are informal and merge into overall firm activities. The objective is to propose a framework for analysis that delves deeper into SMEs? innovation capacity, based on SME specificities. This framework is built on theoretical insights from the entrepreneurship and innovation literature, combined with empirical insights from an in-depth qualitative multiple case study, based on thirty-two innovative SMEs. Our findings confirm and discuss ten critical dimensions of SMEs? innovation capacity previously highlighted by the literature and reveal four new dimensions. These findings allowed us to propose a new framework to analyze SMEs? innovation capacity based on SME specificities. JEL Codes: O32, O33

Keywords: innovation capacity; small enterprises; SME specificities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O32 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cairn.info/load_pdf.php?ID_ARTICLE=JIE_PR1_0019 (application/pdf)
http://www.cairn.info/revue-journal-of-innovation-economics-2018-1-page-139.htm (text/html)
free

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cai:jiedbu:jie_pr1_0019

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Innovation Economics from De Boeck Université
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jean-Baptiste de Vathaire ().