Abstract
Governments are increasingly focusing their efforts on stimulating innovation within small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As a result, university-industry-government collaboration is gaining importance among the agenda of policymakers to enable open innovation in SMEs. However, these inter-organisational relationships often fail to meet expectations, especially when projects are oriented to pre-competitive R&D. Nevertheless, the literature has not yet provided sufficient evidence of the challenges related to the participation of traditional SMEs (i.e., low- and medium-low tech SMEs) in this specific type of collaboration. We collected qualitative data to analyse longitudinally three pre-competitive projects, exploring the main challenges faced by traditional SMEs. We have bracketed the projects in four phases: initiation and planning phase, execution phase, closing phase, and monitoring and control phase. For each of these phases we have individuated firm- and project-level challenges, providing practical and theoretical insights for open innovation scholars.
Highlights
Our society is increasingly facing rapid and sudden changes caused by macro phenomena over which there is little control
Our study aims to further shed light on how traditional small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) engage in open innovation by positing the following research question: “What are the main challenges that traditional SMEs face when participating in precompetitive projects and how do these challenges unfold and influence each other along the phases of the project”?
For the purpose of the study, we focused our analysis on traditional SMEs, which represent 55% of the SMEs involved in the three projects
Summary
Our society is increasingly facing rapid and sudden changes caused by macro phenomena over which there is little control. International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal scenario is and how companies must be able to develop increasingly immediate and disruptive responses to ensure competitiveness and sustainability This is affecting more traditional sectors and companies. Recent literature on innovation and entrepreneurship has highlighted how the complexity of today’s business environment requires collaborative efforts by multiple actors (Bogers et al 2018; Chesbrough and Bogers 2014; Enkel et al 2020; Roundy 2017) This tendency is strongly eradicated in policymakers’ initiatives aimed at building formally structured clusters based on geographical proximity (Ferraris et al 2020; Radziwon and Bogers 2019) to stimulate collaboration and higher innovation performance (Nestle et al 2019; Parmentola et al 2020).
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