The paper is an empirical investigation of key internal and external sources of innovation capability in small and medium firms (SME) in the UK. An experimental measure of innovation capability is designed, which captures not merely the occurrence of innovations but also their scientific complexity and originality. The results obtained with this measure compare favourably to those obtained with more conventional statistics. A range of factors internal to firms are found to be relevant, including owners' technical education and prior working experience in large firms and R&D institutions, technical skills of the workforce, and investments in R&D and training. Significant external factors are: public financial support for R&D, and interaction with nearby R&D and training institutions. Although interaction with customers, suppliers and similar-oriented firms are more frequent than the former, there is no evidence that intensive linkages of this kind would be important for innovative capability. These findings do not support the thrust of current UK policy, which seeks to promote SME innovative performance through the formation of geographical clusters of firms in similar lines of business
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford in its series QEH Working Papers with number
qehwps40.
Length: Date of creation: Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:qeh:qehwps:qehwps40
Contact details of provider: Postal: Queen Elizabeth House 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3TB United Kingdom Phone: +44 (1865) 281800 Fax: +44 (1865) 281801 Email: Web page: http://www.qeh.ox.ac.uk/ More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Rachel Crawford).
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)