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ABSTRACTSmall and medium enterprise (SME) open innovation has received attention only for new product development, overlooking the fact that process innovation is a strategy commonly pursued by SMEs which requires organizing search strategies or external knowledge sourcing for that purpose. Focusing on 3,348 process-oriented innovative SMEs, defined as those that usually and primarily only introduce process rather than product innovation, this study empirically identifies key external sources of SME innovation for process technologies, linking open innovation to SME performance, and highlighting a very important distinction to literature focused on product development. The results contribute to the literature on SME open innovation.

This study verified if the knowledge provides by global pipelines is absorbed by clustered firms contributes to minimising both local and clusters asymmetries. We studied one of the most important agricultural barns of Brazil, the fruit-growing cluster São Francisco River Valley (SFRV). It was a Case Study using the technique of Content Analysis through the ATLAS.ti software. A threefold data collection process enhanced the construct validity, allowing the triangulation of the sources and findings. The results showed that Global pipelines minimised the knowledge asymmetries among regions (macro level), but increase the asymmetries inside the cluster, among the firms (micro level). There are two mediating variables to increase the cluster innovation, the firm absorptive capacity and the information access. In the empirical level, the results showed that manager consultants are an essential figure in the SFRV, they are innovation hunters from global markets and provided the knowledge transfer to clustered firms.

Are consumers accepting AI-based products? What are the socio-demographics influencing the adoption of these products? This study tests the potential users’ social-demographic characteristics that influence the relationship between innovation and AI-based products. The latter are robots (e.g. chatbots) and AI (e.g. recommendation systems, amongst others). A mixed methods approach is adopted using both qualitative and quantitative analysis with non-metrical multidimensional scaling (NMDS) to map opinions about digitally-intensive products, such as robots and AI, and the attitude towards innovation. The research uses data on the general population from the Spanish innovation barometer survey (N = 3,005). Findings show that individuals who have a negative attitude towards innovation have a negative opinion about robots and AI. As regards social-demographic dimensions, age and economic conditions moderate this effect, causing a more positive opinion towards digitally-intensive products amongst young people and individuals with a higher socio-economic level. These effects are increased by the moderating role of sex.

Relatively little attention has been paid to the study of the strategic management of process innovators and their capabilities. This paper contributes to our understanding of process innovation by analyzing responses from 4,208 SMEs which introduced only process innovation, and no product innovation. Our study was set up specifically to allow us to identify and isolate process innovation activities in SMEs. Findings reveal two distinct innovation patterns among process innovators, one characterized primarily by the acquisition of embodied knowledge and external support from suppliers, and a second centered on the development of R&D and high absorptive capacity, accompanied by organizational innovation.

This study answers the question on whether areas of agglomeration or high industry specialization constitute supportive prone-to-innovation environments for the generation of radical innovation. By drawing on the CIS distinction between incremental vs radical innovation, we disentangle the effect of industry specialization on the occurrence of radical innovations, a phenomenon mostly overlooked. By analysing a large dataset of 3,602 firms from CIS and other geographic datasets, results show that a firm's location in high industry specialization areas primarily trims incremental but not radical innovation. Firms’ internal knowledge bases do matter more for radical innovation to occur, rather than location in agglomerations. External knowledge available in regions of high industry specialization is redundant for improving a firm's internal knowledge base for radical innovation and it is more likely to merely enable incremental innovation.