Increasing demand granularity and shortening product life cycles impose a heavier innovation load on companies. As product portfolios need to be expanded further and market demands new products more often, R&D and innovation require more resources and risk exposure. To address this challenge, collaboration for R&D and innovation emerges as a strategic capability. Company innovation strategies have recently been characterized indeed by a tendency towards more openness; with firms increasingly relying on outside information and collaborations to develop new products, services and processes. Open innovation changes therefore how businesses work together by combining internal resources with external ones to boost innovation. The first evidence of this model concern large high-tech manufacturing companies, such as IBM or Intel, which deliberately implemented this paradigm in their innovation strategy. In contrast, small and medium-sized enterprises have received scant attention in the open innovation literature. Our work aims at examining, through a quali-quantitative analysis, the innovation performances of SMEs and how they are connected to the recourse of external collaborations, using a sample of 181 manufacturing SMEs from the Veneto region. Results come from the estimation of a negative binomial regression model and a configurational analysis conducted through the fsQCA 3.0 software.

Silvia Rita Sedita is associate professor of Management at the Department of Economics and Management, University of Padova, where she teaches Marketing and Advanced Marketing. Her research agenda includes issues within the field of management of innovation in inter-organizational networks. The theoretical focus is on agglomerations (clusters and industrial districts), project based organizations and innovation ecosystems. The main research settings are creative industries (design, music industry), high-tech industries (life science, advanced materials), Italian industrial districts and clusters. After finishing her PhD in Economics and Management of Firms and Local Systems at the University of Florence, she obtained a postdoctoral position at the University of Padova, where she has been employed as assistant professor of Management from 2006 to 2015. During the years she has been involved in a number of national, international and EU research projects, which also led her to spend several periods of study and research abroad, at the Copenhagen Business School (DK), The University of Tokyo (JP) and the University of Nairobi (Kenya). She published research articles and book chapters in national and international outlets. Her work has appeared in Research Policy, Journal of Economic Geography, Regional Studies, Urban Studies, International Journal of Project Management, Industry and Innovation, European Planning Studies, Technology Analysis and Strategic Management.

18:30-19:30, July 11, 2019　(Doors open at 18:00)

English

GRIPS, Science for REdesigning Science, Technology and Innovation Policy center (SciREX center), GRIPS Innovation, Science and Technology Policy Program (GIST）

Please register at this registration form (https://krs.bz/scirex/m?f=249) by 17:00 on July 10. 

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