Culture and innovation in SMEs: the intellectual structure of research for further inquiry

ABSTRACT

Regional and organizational cultures are commonly considered key enablers to innovation dynamics in organizations, in particular to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Although this intersection is a crucial topic of research, studies addressing this issue remain limited in number and scope in the case of SMEs. In this article, a systematic literature review of that intersection is presented by gathering articles from ISI-WoS and Scopus databases. It combines a qualitative approach (content analysis) and a statistical procedure (HOMALS) to analyse the information from 1947 articles found. As a result, the contribution is twofold: a map of the intellectual structure of research and a codebook of descriptors. The study helps identify relevant gaps for future research, specifically the need for mixed approaches from a variety of social sciences with a particular focus on regional science. Future research should shift from a static to a dynamic perspective of culture in groups, organizations and territories. In the case of SMEs, this can be labelled as transformational culture: the study of how organizational and regional cultures may co-evolve along with the changes in the environment by seizing on the SMEs’ flexibility and flattened organizational structure.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture
• innovation
• SMEs
• literature review
• correspondence analysis
• transformational culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Miguel Gonzalez-Loureiro http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4299-1995

Maria José Sousa http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8633-4199

Hugo Pinto http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8497-4798

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by national funds provided by FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology (Portugal) through the project UID/SOC/04020/2013. Hugo Pinto also acknowledges the financial support from FCT (SFRH/BPD/84038/2012) funded by POCH and co-financed by the European Social Fund and national funds from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education.