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Small Business Economics

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01.08.2014

Non-R&D SMEs: external knowledge, absorptive capacity and product innovation

verfasst von: Mikko Moilanen, Stein Østbye, Kristin Woll

Erschienen in: Small Business Economics | Ausgabe 2/2014

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Abstract

The relationship between external knowledge, absorptive capacity (AC) and innovative performance for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is investigated empirically. Using data from a survey on firms located in North Norway, we ask whether AC plays a mediating role between different external knowledge inflows and innovative performance. The results are consistent with AC as an important mediator for transforming external knowledge inflows into higher innovative performance if we include all SMEs in the sample. However, this result is not robust when considering the sub-sample of non-R&D SMEs only. External knowledge inflows have a much stronger direct effect on innovation performance for non-R&D firms and leave a weak mediating effect of AC. Our findings suggest that measures of AC should be developed further in order to make AC a more relevant concept for empirical studies of SMEs without in-house R&D.

Vorheriger Artikel How much of a socialist legacy? The re-emergence of entrepreneurship in the East German transformation to a market economy

Nächster Artikel Innovation embedded in entrepreneurs’ networks and national educational systems

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A report from the project in Norwegian has been made public and is available from the authors upon request.

Measures of innovation can be classified as direct or indirect (Hong et al. 2012). Direct measures only measure inputs devoted to innovative activities, whereas indirect measures focus on the output. Measuring innovation as an output, such as the number of innovations or an “innovation count,” is referred to as “objective” and tends to be biased towards radical/product innovation as opposed to incremental/process innovations (where unsuccessful innovations are automatically excluded). Subjective measures consider innovation as an activity and a range of innovation-related data are collected via firm-based surveys.

We are grateful to Ossi Pesämaa for making this point to us.

The measure of AC is normalized by scaling it to [0,1]. The result of the principal component factor analysis suggests a single factor with an eigenvalue >1 (1.46).

We do not run a separate path analysis for R&D SMEs because of the small sample size (N = 122). Kline (2005) recommends that the sample size should be ten times (or ideally 20 times) as many cases as parameters, and at least 200.

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Titel: Non-R&D SMEs: external knowledge, absorptive capacity and product innovation
verfasst von: Mikko Moilanen
Stein Østbye
Kristin Woll
Publikationsdatum: 01.08.2014
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Small Business Economics / Ausgabe 2/2014
Print ISSN: 0921-898X
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0913
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-014-9545-9

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