A cursory review of the industrial policies of most nations suggests that exporting matters. Identifying exporting firms and facilitating their endeavours (or encouraging others to emulate them) are familiar policy themes, and studies of the relationship between firm characteristics and the...

It is generally recognized that firms’ innovative performance can be enhanced by collaborating with remote partners. However, remote collaborations are not without challenges, as geographical distance may frustrate tacit knowledge transfer and inter-organizational learning. We investigate the...

Drawing upon a sample of 256 small firms who applied for bank loans, the current paper is concerned with the extent to which ‘innovativeness’ is associated with a lower level of loan application success. The paper records the proportion of loan successfully applied for and estimates a series...

This paper takes as its starting point an item of relatively recent academic orthodoxy: the insistence that ‘…interactive learning and collective entrepreneurship are fundamental to the process of innovation’ (Lundvall, 1992, p. 9). From this, academics have frequently taken...

The current paper is concerned with exploring the role of absorptive capacity in extending the reach of innovation-related collaboration in high technology small firms. Drawing on survey data from a sample of 316 Dutch high-tech small firms, engaged in 1245 collaborations, we explore the...

Drawing upon data from a sample of 597 small manufacturing firms, the current paper hopes to contribute to the emerging body of empirical literature, which seeks to distinguish the characteristics of more and less innovative small firms. Importantly, in so doing, a definition of innovation is...

Freel M. S. and Harrison R. T. (2006) Innovation and cooperation in the small firm sector: evidence from 'Northern Britain', Regional Studies 40, 289-305. Over the last 20 years, network-based models of innovation-led economic development have grown increasingly popular to both the polity and...

The article presents an analysis of a large-scale survey with the aim of understanding differences in the open, interactive and distributed nature of external innovation relations amongst firms belonging to different industrial knowledge bases. The thesis is that the source of critical...

The requirement for small firms to collaborate, as a means to supplementing and complementing limited internal resources, has dominated much of the academic and policy debate on regional development and small firm innovation throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. However, relatively little...