The Impact of Environmental Turbulence on the Perceived Importance of Innovation and Innovativeness in SMEs

This study investigates how market turbulence, technological turbulence, and competitive intensity affect the perceived importance of innovation and innovativeness, and thus SMEs’ business performance. Structural equation modeling is conducted on a sample of 373 SMEs. Our findings show that both market and technological turbulence increase the perceived importance of innovation, but only market turbulence impacts SMEs’ innovativeness directly. The perceived importance of innovation mediates environmental turbulence’s influence on a firm’s innovativeness. Competitive intensity has no significant effect on the perceived importance of innovation and innovativeness. Finally, innovativeness enhances business performance when using both perceptual and lagged objective performance data.