Organizational Innovation beyond Technology

This chapter illustrates internal market orientation's philosophy (IMO) and the innovative Internal Marketing practices in competitive firms. The chapter begins with an explanation of the field of innovation in services going beyond technology to IMO research topics. A brief history of Internal Marketing (IM) and main literature contributions are provided. After that, the focus turns to the empirical evaluation of IMO's dimensions. The analysis is undertaken with data from a survey in Spanish and Portuguese knowledge intensive business services (KIBs). An exploratory factor analysis was performed and eight factors have been extracted from the data set via principal components analysis: Efforts to create a good place to work, Focus on competencies, Dissemination, Awareness of labour market conditions, Focus on individual training and development, Feed-Back communication, Managing the moments of truth, and Internal market research. The chapter concludes with some reflections and suggestions for managers and future research directions are also highlighted.

Internationalization Process of Innovative SMEs in Lebanon

This chapter aims to highlight the relationship between innovation and internationalization in the context of international development of Lebanese innovative SMEs. The problems of the commitment of these SMEs in a process of internationalization is relevant in the Mediterranean countries in general and Lebanon in particular, but few empirical studies have been done so far to understand their international development (Ramadan, 2008; Ramadan and Levratto, 2011). The role of key factors such as size, age, international cooperation and strategic planning in the international development of Lebanese SMEs has rarely been comprehensively studied. Motivated by the literature that establishes a positive relationship between innovation and internationalization, this study presents a research proposal on these SMEs to bring out certain variables that characterize them. Moreover, the aim of the study is to verify the effect of the above factors and integrates into schools of thought that attempt to demonstrate that the international development of SMEs is influenced by a context that must be identified in the case of Lebanon.

R&D Activities in Family Firms

This chapter investigates R&D investment in publicly listed family firms, and highlights the distinctions between these and non-family firms. The empirical study draws on data on German firms and their level of R&D expenditure between 2001 and 2012. The study finds that family firms spend more on R&D than non-family firms, confirming findings from the literature that long-term business orientation, superior performance and entrepreneurial success are characteristics of family firms. The research helps explain the differences between the R&D investment activities of family and non-family firms and contributes to the understanding of R&D activities of family firms, suggesting that family ownership is responsible for their strong entrepreneurial and innovation orientation.

Internationalization of Polish Higher Education within Knowledge Transfer and Innovation

Internationalization of higher education in Poland is a relatively new subject which has been gradually gaining its importance. The economic and political transformation of Poland opened new opportunities for Polish universities. The accession to the European Union enabled the educational and research units to apply for European funds in this respect. Despite numerous difficulties, the universities reform their strategies and search for new solutions to increase the level of internationalization and thus their competitiveness. These actions are necessary and crucial for their further development. The chapter describes general issues of internationalization of Polish higher education and shows that the level of internationalization may be achieved successfully by various forms of cross-border cooperation. Polish-Czech cooperation in the field of knowledge transfer and innovation carried out by two partner universities located in the Polish – Czech borderland is a case study illustrating this process.

Obstacles to Portuguese Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Andorra

Nowadays the world is in constant and successive changes and to follow these changes one necessarily has to be prepared to act throughout life with initiative, innovation and value creation. However, obstacles to entrepreneurship are numerous, and those who seek these challenges in foreign countries have to face even greater problems. In order to understand the difficulties found by Portuguese emigrant entrepreneurs in Andorra, the authors conducted a survey in 2012 with 51 Portuguese entrepreneurs residing in that country. The results are described in this chapter. It was found that the main obstacles to setting up a business are mostly bureaucratic in nature, due to legislation not adjusted to reality, suggesting, first and foremost, the urgency of an intense work yet to be done in this field, both by governmental bodies and by other institutions directly related with these entrepreneurs.

Supply Chain Management

The main purpose of this chapter is to develop an exploratory proposal for identifying innovative suppliers, creating knowledge in an area not very deeply explored. Based on a literature revision based on the innovative supplier identification and management, the study suggests that innovative suppliers are highly specialized and technically competent companies, located nearby their customers and take part on their client's improvement program. Based on the literature revision, a framework analyzing client-supplier relationships throughout the supply chain is proposed. The framework uses the strategic alignment concept between clients and suppliers. Finally, 61 questions were developed to identify the innovative suppliers.

Can an Innovation Oriented Vision Statement Really Trigger Innovation in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises?

In literature, it is claimed by some studies that the content of a vision statement can be a tool to reach some desired individual and organizational level results. The importance of various types of innovation for organizations has been supported by many empirical studies. Therefore, this study investigates the effect of a vision statement's content on the amount of innovation in Turkish small and medium sized enterprises. With this aim, first this chapter briefly reviews the literature on vision statements and innovation, followed by the methodology and findings. The chapter ends with future directions and conclusions, which include the originalities and limitations of this study.

Innovation in Higher Education

The issue of Corporate Social Responsibility has received increasing attention over the last few years. Organizations are introducing socially responsible practices in their strategies in order to be more competitive. At the same time, universities are also aware of the importance of the triple organizational vision (economic, social and environmental) and they are making a lot of actions to improve their performance. In this chapter, the authors state that innovation in Higher Education is an important fact and express the experience of innovation from socially responsible universities. These entities have to know their current state and the future demands from the different stakeholders with the intention of satisfy them. This chapter studies how to drive innovation and how to structure it at the university context, how to inform about University Social Responsibility and, finally, the benefits for socially responsible universities. Finally, in this chapter the authors link three important topics today: Corporate Social Responsibility, Universities, and Innovation. As a result, they propose a set of aspects in which Universities could innovate by improving their social responsibility.

Innovation in Healthcare Organizations

The main purpose of this chapter is to analyse innovation in organizations of the Portuguese healthcare sector, in order to identify its critical success factors. In this study, the authors followed a quantitative approach, combining statistical and documental analysis, through the Community Innovation Survey data analysis and processing, thus performing an exploratory, descriptive and transversal study. The healthcare sector reveals dynamism in introducing products that are new to the market and the company, mainly through a closed innovation process. External cooperation is preferably R&D-oriented, and there is low involvement of market agents in R&D activities, through partnerships. However, these are seen as an important source of information and organizations seek to meet their needs. Different types of organizations adopt different innovation strategies, depending on their market and current situation, which translates into a contextual innovation policy, in line with the current theoretical developments.

Entrepreneurship and National Culture

The direct relationship between national cultural practice and entrepreneurship activities is analyzed in this chapter, based on the analysis of 44 countries. Datasets from 2012 and 2013 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report are used to characterize three types of entrepreneurship: early-stage entrepreneurial activity (TEA); necessity-driven entrepreneurship (NDE) and opportunity-driven (ODE) entrepreneurship. Data sets on national cultural values are used to analyze five dimensions of Hofstede's work on cultural values (power distance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, long/short term orientation, and uncertainty avoidance). For that, the authors use the Values Survey Module 2013, which has been adapted from Hofstede's previous work from 2010 and 2008. The main conclusion is that the three types of entrepreneurship analyzed in this chapter are differently explained by the cultural and expanded models. If the country of origin and the type of economy are useful to explain TEA, they are of no added value to explain necessity-driven or opportunity-driven entrepreneurship.