Building absorptive capacity to organise inbound open innovation in traditional industries

The discussion on open innovation suggests that the ability to absorb external knowledge has become a major driver for competition. For R&D intensive large firms, the concept of open innovation in relation to absorptive capacity is relatively well understood. Little attention has; however, been paid to how both small firms and firms, which operate in traditional sectors, engage in open innovation activities. The latter two categories of firms often dispose of no, or at most a relatively low level of, absorptive capacity. Open innovation has two faces. In the case of inbound open innovation, companies screen their environment to search for technology and knowledge and do not exclusively rely on in-house R&D. A key pre-condition is that firms dispose of “absorptive capacity” to internalise external knowledge. SMEs and firms in traditional industries might need assistance in building absorptive capacity. This paper focuses on the role of collective research centres in building absorptive capacity at the inter-organisational level. In order to do so, primary data was collected through interviews with CEOs of these technology intermediaries and their member firms and analysed in combination with secondary data. The technology intermediaries discussed are created to help firms to take advantage of technological developments. The paper demonstrates that the openness of the innovation process forces firms lacking absorptive capacity to search for alternative ways to engage in inbound open innovation. The paper highlights the multiple activities of which absorptive capacity in intermediaries is made up; defines the concept of absorptive capacity as a pre-condition to open innovation; and demonstrates how firms lacking absorptive capacity collectively cope with distributed knowledge and innovation.     

Localized capabilities and the internationalization of manufacturing activities by SMEs

In this paper it is argued that the internationalization of production through foreign direct investment (FDI) by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is influenced by local level idiosyncracies. Although SMEs suffer from inherent constraints to international growth (due to the scarce availability of financial and managerial resources), the presence of qualified localized capabilities strengthen and complement their competitive/ownership advantages, thus favouring their internationalization. These capabilities are related to the advanced specialized services available to the firms, the existence of a ‘marshallian atmosphere’, and an environment conducive to innovation and learning. However, it is argued that negative externalities stemming from protectionism-oriented public intervention discourage the international growth of firms and negatively influence the propensity of SMEs to internationalize. Empirical support for these premises is provided by this study of the Italian case over the decade 1986–1995.     

中小企业技术创新服务体系建设探析

构建中小企业技术创新服务体系是促进企业技术创新和推动技术进步的重要条件,能否建立起功能完善、运作高效的中小企业技术创新服务体系,直接关系到中小企业技术创新的进度和成效。因此,只有建立完善、协作的中小企业技术创新服务体系,才能提高企业的自主创新能力。     

Open innovation in SMEs: Trends,motives and management challenges

Open innovation has so far been studied mainly in high-tech, multinational enterprises. This exploratory paper investigates if open innovation practices are also applied by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Drawing on a database collected from 605 innovative SMEs in the Netherlands, we explore the incidence of and apparent trend towards open innovation. The survey furthermore focuses on the motives and perceived challenges when SMEs adopt open innovation practices. Within the survey, open innovation is measured with eight innovation practices reflecting technology exploration and exploitation in SMEs. We find that the responding SMEs engage in many open innovation practices and have increasingly adopted such practices during the past 7 years. In addition, we find no major differences between manufacturing and services industries, but medium-sized firms are on average more heavily involved in open innovation than their smaller counterparts. We furthermore find that SMEs pursue open innovation primarily for market-related motives such as meeting customer demands, or keeping up with competitors. Their most important challenges relate to organizational and cultural issues as a consequence of dealing with increased external contacts.     

Product Innovation,Credit Constraints,and Trade Credit: Evidence from a Cross‐country Study

This paper studies the relationship between trade credit and innovation. Although trade credit is well researched in the finance literature, its link to innovation has been neglected in prior research. We argue that innovative small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) are more likely to use trade credit than non‐innovative SMEs because of credit constraints and that business partners may have incentives to offer trade credit especially to SMEs with product innovations. The relationship between product innovation and trade credit is empirically examined using a sample of SMEs from 15 European countries. The results of an econometric analysis confirm a positive relationship between innovation and trade credit. In particular, SMEs with product innovations have a higher probability of using trade credit than other SMEs. Moreover, the results suggest that the effect of product innovation is only statistically significant if SMEs report that access to financing or cost of financing are obstacles for the operation and growth of their businesses. Hence, the results point to the relevance of trade credit as a source of short‐term external finance for innovative SMEs that are credit constrained. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

产业集群组织范式视角的中小企业创新机理研究

中小企业集群与中小企业创新是当今经济领域内的两个重要课题。企业技术创新不是一个孤立的事件和活动,而是一个社会的、复杂的、互动的过程。产业集群是中小企业创新的有效平台和方式。中小企业利用集群方式进行技术创新,这同时促进了中小企业和产业集群竞争优势的提升。中小企业要想有效利用集群平台以技术创新,需要进行主动性的管理,如知识共享、提高吸收能力、构建分工协作网络等。这些要素与集群企业技术创新、集群竞争优势之间是一个正反馈的不断增强的过程。     

国外促进中小企业自主创新经验对我国的启示

中小企业是提高国家综合国力与国际竞争力的重要生力军,中小企业自主创新越来越成为影响各国经济增长的重要因素。文章在分析我国中小企业自主创新面临困境的基础上,借鉴发达国家促进中小企业自主创新经验,提出促进我国中小企业自主创新的措施建议。     

中小企业营销模式创新研究

面对创新的大趋势,以及日趋激烈的国际竞争,中小企业面临市场的急剧变化,要想在剧变的市场上获得持续的发展,构建中小企业营销创新应该成我国中小企业营销的主旋律。本文从创新理念入手,分析中小企业营销的现状,重点研究创新的可行性、并提出创新的策略。     

加强中小企业知识服务的探讨

进入知识经济时代,知识的传播、创新和应用成为推动社会进步的主要动力。中小企业在我国经济结构中占有十分重要的地位,但我国中小企业普遍存在技术水平低下、员工素质不高等问题,严重阻碍了我国中小企业的健康发展。加强中小企业知识服务,可以提升中小企业核心竞争力,促进中小企业技术创新和可持续发展。     

The future of nanotechnologies

Nanotechnology is the first major worldwide research initiative of the 21st century. Nanotechnologies are applied to cross industrial problems and are a general purpose technology that acts as both a basis for technology solutions or at the convergence of other enabling technologies, like biotechnologies, computational sciences, physical sciences, communication technologies, cognitive sciences, social psychology and other social sciences. Nanotechnologies are pervasive solution vectors in our economic environment. It is necessary to develop new methods to assess nanotechnologies development to better understand nanotechnology based innovation. As general purpose and enabling technologies, nanotechnologies reveal commercialization processes, from start-ups to large firms in collaboration with public sector research, and which lead to changing patterns of industrial organization which influence public policy initiatives to foster their development.     

建立中小企业政策性信用担保体系问题研究

在当前地方政府应对国际金融危机的政策选择中,支持中小企业发展是一个重要着力点,而融资难问题又始终是困扰中小企业发展的难题。     

Together or separately? Direct and synergistic effects of Effectuation and Causation on innovation in technology-based SMEs

Technology-based SMEs develop their activity in changing environments with strong competitive pressures. These conditions make them much more likely to innovate but also make the innovative process more challenging due to greater complexity of decisions about resources and establishment of actions to achieve favorable innovation results. Although prior studies have analyzed diverse factors that impact the innovative dynamics of this type of firm, little advance has been made in exploring the problem from the perspective of decision-making. This study seeks to close this research gap using Effectuation Theory, one of the most-cited theories emerging in the field of entrepreneurship. More specifically, we analyze the use of causal and effectual decision-making logics to evaluate their direct and ambidextrous effects on innovation in technology-based SMEs. Our results provide evidence that not just one path, but rather a pool of alternatives, supports product and process innovation development. More specifically, when technology SMEs pursue product innovation, both effectuation and causation can be used as predominant mechanisms to achieve positive innovation results. If firms also seek to develop process innovations, however, they may obtain better results with an ambidextrous approach.

     

用供需网理念推进企业技术创新研究——以宁波中小企业为例

金融危机使得企业技术创新被提到了更为重要的位置,宁波作为中小企业众多、技术创新意识强烈的城市之一,具有典型性。而供需网的网络性、多功能性、开放性等特征,可以促进宁波中小企业拥有全局视野,充分合作,促进企业科研成果的商品化和科研体制的改革,并促进产业结构的调整,提高产业的竞争力。另外,研究区域经济,加强中小企业信息化的基础平台建设;培养全球化眼光,运用供需网理念;注重人才培养,进行多层次人力资源开发等措施,也能帮助中小企业走出技术创新发展瓶颈。     

加强中小企业技术创新提高企业核心竞争力——以台湾中小企业技术创新的成功经验为借鉴

技术创新是企业的命脉,中小企业是技术创新主体中最富有活力的组成部分,在推动技术进步等方面起着不可替代的积极作用。受全球金融危机的影响,结合中小企业自身的特点,认真分析影响中小企业技术创新的主要因素,找到可行的对策,以提高中小企业的技术创新能力和核心竞争力。     

Roles, resources and benefits of intermediate organizations supporting triple helix collaborative R&D: The case of Precarn

Triple helix collaborations involving academia, government and industry are believed vital to the success of regional technology development. However, due to differences in culture, organizational functioning and incentive mechanisms as well as the different objectives of the various actors involved, such collaboration is difficult to create and sustain. A case study of the organization called Precarn, a collaborative, which manages a program of triple helix projects, is used here to illustrate how an intermediate organization can help triple helix partnerships towards the successful commercialization of new technologies. The paper contributes to the literature on managing R&D collaborations and innovation networks using organization theories to explain why and how collaborative intermediate organizations can facilitate successful technological adoption and commercialization across innovation networks.     

Leaders and Laggards in Environmental Innovation: An Empirical Analysis of SMEs in Europe

The main purpose of this article is studying the factors influencing eco‐innovative intensity in the European SMEs. Building upon the 'innovation triangle model', business competences, environmental orientation and network involvement are considered as the main determinants of 'greenness' of innovation in a sample of 3852 SMEs. Four categories of eco‐innovators (leaders, followers, loungers and laggards) are identified, and their profiles/driving factors are described using a generalized ordinal logistic model. Our results confirm that the increasing demand for green products and the adoption of eco‐organizational innovation affect positively the level of environmental innovation, while technological lock‐ins have the opposite effect across all categories. Neither leaders nor laggards are influenced by environmental policies. Small firms and those who give importance to financial constraints tend not to achieve upper categories, while valuing technological capabilities, market power and networks are crucial determinants of being in upper categories of eco‐innovation intensity. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

International endogenous growth,macro anomalies,and asset prices

This paper develops a two-country production economy with complete and frictionless financial markets and international trade in which investments in research and development (R&D) by entrants lead to endogenous new firm creation and economic growth. Innovative entrants use both consumption goods in their innovation technologies to capture international technological spillovers. Households also consume both goods. Specifically, I compare the equilibrium implications from the model with technology spillovers to the ones from an equivalent model without technology spillovers, i.e. a model where entrants only use domestic final goods in their R&D expenditures. With these two models at hand, new insights on the interplay of endogenous growth and long-run risks, technology spillovers, complete financial markets, and international trade are obtained, particularly with respect to international macro and asset pricing anomalies. The novel technology spillover channel has the potential to help explaining a number of these anomalies.     

中小企业技术创新的优势及策略

我国中小企业占企业总数99％以上，是技术创新的主体。文章分析了中小企业技术创新对企业发展的重要影响以及意义，结合中小企业技术创新的优势提出了相应的创新策略。     

The Pharmacia story of entrepreneurship and as a creative technical university1 – an experiment in innovation,organizational break up and industrial renaissance

While innovative technology supply has been the focus of much neo-Schumpeterian modelling, few have addressed the critical and more resource-demanding commercializing of the same technologies. The result may have been a growth policy focused on the wrong problem. Using Competence Bloc Theory and a firm-based macro to macro approach we abandon the assumed linear relation between technology change and economic growth of such models, and demonstrate that lack of local commercialization competences is likely to block growth even though innovative technology supplies are abundant.

The break up, reorganization and part withdrawal of Pharmacia from the local Uppsala (in Sweden) economy after a series of international mergers illustrate this. Pharmacia has ‘released’ a wealth of technologies in local markets. Local commercialization competence, notably industrially competent financing has, however, not been sufficient to fill in through indigenous entrepreneurship the vacuum left by Pharmacia. Only thanks to foreign investors, attracted by Pharmacia technologies that have opted to stay for the long term, the local Uppsala economy seems to be heading for a successful future.

The Pharmacia case also demonstrates the role of advanced firms as ‘technical universities’ and the nature of an experimentally organized economy (EOE) in which business mistakes are a natural learning cost for economic development.     

我国中小企业技术创新的问题分析与对策措施

改革开放以来,我国中小企业蓬勃发展,在活跃市场经济、吸纳劳动就业等诸多方面起到了不可替代的作用。特别是一批科技型中小企业,已经成为我国技术创新和高新技术产业化的重要力量。同时,我国中小企业技术创新的总体水平还比较低,存在问题的原因,主要体现为资金、人才、风险、信息原因和法律政策等原因。进行中小企业技术创新,要拓宽融资梁道,解决中小企业技术创新的资金瓶颈问题;重视企业科技人才培养,提升中小企业提高创新能力;利用外生资源,寻求与大企业、大专院校、科研机构的合作,降低中小企业的技术创新的风险。