Assessing the innovation process of SMEs

Abstract: Innovation has long been acknowledged as a major driver to business economy. Dedicated to innovation prosperous companies are tackle the actions and procedures involved in the creation and commercialization of ideas. Due to its rich typology innovation literature covers a vast set of research descriptions. A majority of the academia favor innovation to be best characterized as a process, a continuum. Yet, the innovation process comprises differently depending on nature of the company. As a result both academia and business stress that the innovation process of SMEs requires intensified research efforts. Thus, this thesis proposes a theoretical integration between innovation processes and organizational contexts of SMEs. With this in mind the research problem for this study was formulized as ‘assessing the innovation process of SMEs'. Adopting a qualitative approach multiple case studies were applied on two industrial clusters: manufacturing and IT/Telecom. The findings indicate that the innovation process remains an area of concern for the investigated companies. Although cases indicate different maturity levels in perceiving innovation activities the findings support the proposed framework, which was categorized in five distinctive phases (idea generation, concept development, product development, commercialization and sustainability). Based on personal preferences and skills sets the results show variation in individual's innovative orientations. Whereas more practically orientations distinguish manufacturing, a somewhat opposing synthesizing characteristic were found in the IT/Telecom cases. In addition, the coherence between peoples' innovative orientation were more apparent within cases than between cases. Finally, formalization of actions and procedures relevant to the innovation process was considered a major concern in all cases.