Strengthening SMEs’ innovation culture through collaborations with public research organizations. Do all firms benefit equally?

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether collaborating with public research organizations (PROs) contributes to strengthening the innovation culture of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). We examine to what extent their innovation culture is reinforced by collaborations with research organizations and investigate the type of organizational strategies that enhance this effect of collaboration. The empirical study is based on a survey of firms that collaborate with the largest Spanish PRO, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Our results indicate that SMEs differ greatly in their capacity to strengthen their innovation culture through collaboration with research organizations. We show also that firms with formal innovation plans that develop internal and external search strategies are more likely to improve their innovation culture as a result of collaboration with PROs. These findings provide managers with new insights into how to strengthen their firms’ innovation culture through collaboration with research organizations.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation culture
• firms–public research organizations collaborations
• collaboration benefits
• formal innovation plan
• search strategy
• SMEs

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge CSIC and other IMPACTO project researchers (from INGENIO and IESA institutes) for their hard and very satisfactory work and also to the firms, whose questionnaire answers allowed developing the database. The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. Any errors or omissions remain the authors’ responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Spanish version of the Community Survey Innovation (CIS).

2 For more details on CSIC characteristics at the time of the study, see Olmos-Peñuela, Benneworth and Castro-Martínez (2014).

3 Eighty-nine per cent of the sample firms conducted occasional or regular R&D activities, which is a much higher percentage than the one obtained from the Spanish Innovation Surveys.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) under the IMPACTO project and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [grant number CS02013-48053-R].