Innovating Management or Managing Innovation, What Matters for the Brazilian SMEs?

In a recent paper, Sequeira et al. (2013) points out that it is time to think about new ways of managing companies, particularly in emerging economies. Intangible assets become a key success factor for sustainable growth especially in the emerging countries. As experiences in the fast moving city and state of Rio de Janeiro have shown, the development of systematic management procedures for these intangible assets is extremely useful for fast growing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in order to serve as a solid backbone for an increasingly knowledge-based economy. Brazil has been evolving into a knowledge society dealing with political changes, globalization, new technologies, and new global competitors, such as China and India. A quick Google search on the issues innovating management and managing innovation shows the predominance of the second one, with 95% of interest. Even so, this paper intends to demonstrate, based on a case study, that Innovating Management is extremely relevant for companies and, particularly, for those emerging countries that wish to become competitive in a global economy. Furthermore, the paper discusses the challenge of integrating a method of Intellectual Capital into a comprehensive strategic change process. In order to promote sustainable business development in an emerging economy, the method, named Intellectual Capital Statement Brazil (ICSBR), has to be used to establish a continuous improvement cycle in the individual company, focusing on practical actions for maintaining and developing its intangible assets to ensure future competitive capability. The need to enhance companies' and, by extension, countries' competitiveness has grown rapidly. As a consequence, organisations and, particularly, government policies need to redress some critical competitiveness issues. In this sense, the paper demonstrates that the establishment of the National Monitor of Innovation, as a strategic tool, can fulfill the requirements of main stakeholders' perspectives. Without such tool, organisations and the country will find it difficult to position themselves within the global marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]