SHORT-, MID-, AND LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF INNOVATION ACTIVITIES: A CONFIGURATIONAL ANALYSIS ON CONTINUITY, COMPETENCE, AND COOPERATION

The constant generation of innovation is a major factor in explaining a firm’s long-term success. Accordingly, previous literatures have identified several organisational, processual, and cultural factors that enable firms to promote successful innovation. Although these success factors appear to be rather different, most of them revolve around continuity, competence, or cooperation. As little prior research has focused on the complexity and interdependence of these various interlinked theoretical concepts, we adopt a configurational and longitudinal approach to analyse the effect of continuity, competence, and cooperation on the innovation performance of a firm on short-, mid-, and long-term bases. Based on a longitudinal data set that captures the innovation behaviour of 220 firms from 2009 to 2015, we find that continuity is the basic requirement for constant innovation performance. In addition, cooperation is likely to be supportive of innovation performance in the short term, while competence supports innovation performance in the long term.

CHARACTERISING ABSORPTIVE CAPACITY SUPPORTING SMEs’ LEARNINGS WITHIN COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION NETWORKS: INSIGHTS FROM MULTI-LEVEL CASE STUDIES

Through collaborative innovation networks (CINs), SMEs access valuable knowledge which requires the deployment of their absorptive capacity (ACAP) to be efficiently used. A small and medium enterprise (SME) absorbs this knowledge to fulfil reciprocal learning for achieving the network innovation goal, but also one-way learning to individually improve its performance. Nevertheless, no study explains how these opposing learnings unfold for SMEs in CINs to guide their ACAP deployment. Based on three cases of CINs including SMEs and two focus groups, we propose a characterisation of ACAP supporting SMEs’ learnings within CINs. As a result, an SME deploys acquisition, assimilation and application actions and attitudes to contribute to the CIN’s setting-up and operational stages, while fulfilling one-way learning. These practices have different focuses and intensity according to the network stage and the SME’s contextual setting. Hence, this study highlights the peculiarities of ACAP that enable SMEs in CINs manage the interplay between reciprocal and one-way learnings.