SME open innovation for process development: Understanding process-dedicated external knowledge sourcing

ABSTRACT

Small and medium enterprise (SME) open innovation has received attention only for new product development, overlooking the fact that process innovation is a strategy commonly pursued by SMEs which requires organizing search strategies or external knowledge sourcing for that purpose. Focusing on 3,348 process-oriented innovative SMEs, defined as those that usually and primarily only introduce process rather than product innovation, this study empirically identifies key external sources of SME innovation for process technologies, linking open innovation to SME performance, and highlighting a very important distinction to literature focused on product development. The results contribute to the literature on SME open innovation.

KEYWORDS:

• SME open innovation
• search strategies
• external sourcing
• CIS data

Acknowledgments

Dr. Francisca Sempere-Ripoll thanks Dr. Davide Parrilli, from the Faculty of Management at Bournemouth University (UK) and “Salvador de Madariaga Program” funded by the Spanish Ministry Science, Innovation and Universities (ref: PRX18/00244).

Notes

¹ Aggregated microdata supplied by Eurostat differ slightly from that directly accessible to each national statistical office across countries, as the latter are not aggregated.

² For instance, Hervas-Oliver, Sempere-Ripoll, Boronat-Moll, and Rojas (2015), Hervas-Oliver, Ripoll-Sempere, and Boronat-Moll (2016), De-Miguel-Molina, Hervás-Oliver, and Boix (2019) or Hervas-Oliver, Sempere-Ripoll, Estelles-Miguel, and Rojas-Alvarado (2019), among many others.

³ For the sake of brevity, more available on request. With regard to the differences between manufacturing and service sectors, this study is grounded on an integration approach (Gallouj & Savona, 2009; Salter & Tether, 2006), assuming that both manufacturing and service sectors can be concurrently analyzed, albeit while respecting certain key differences.

⁴ K = 3 was selected as a result of the previous tests of the hierarchical cluster techniques, following (Hair, Anderson, Tatham, & Black, 1998) procedures for cluster analysis.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge funding from the Spanish Ministry Science, Innovation and Universities, RTI2018-095739-B-100, Prof. Dr. Hervas-Oliver as Principal Researcher.