DISCREPANCIES BETWEEN CLUSTER SERVICES AND SMES? NEEDS CONSTRAINING THE CREATION OF A CULTURE OF INNOVATION AMIDST INDUSTRY 4.0

Background: SMEs performance and their innovativeness are associated to their participation in innovation networks. Thus, SMEs tend to join clusters aiming to accelerate their process of innovation, catch up with the dynamics of the industry and increase their probability to access external knowledge and resources. Consequently, promoting a collaborative atmosphere by boosting the synergies between cluster managers and SMEs will foment a culture of innovation. Moreover, the inclusion of new technologies, and especially the advent of industry 4.0, is facilitating collaboration, while at the same time accelerating the development of innovation outcomes and setting new challenges for SMEs. This contribution identifies discrepancies between offer (clusters) and demand (SMEs), hindering the creation of a culture of innovation and highlights critical points, where both SMEs and Clusters, may gain from a proper interaction.

Methods: 120 empirical studies analyzing innovation determinants have been evaluated. Based on these determinants and stressing the importance of SMEs participating in collaborative-networked innovation actions, a concept for supporting the creation of a culture of innovation is proposed. This concept is enhanced by exploring potential benefits of industry 4.0 technologies supporting the acquisition, assimilation and transformation of knowledge into innovation. Additionally, in order to gain an insight about the interrelation between clusters and SMEs towards the creation of an innovation culture, an empirical study has been conducted.

Results: The descriptive analysis shows that communication problems and discrepancies between cluster organizations and SMEs are evident. Moreover, the understanding of SMEs on the requirements for building an innovation culture is rather low. Although cluster organizations tend to generate services supporting their members’ innovation processes, a gap between offer and demand is observable among all phases defined in the concept.

Conclusions: we suggest that cluster managers could play a more preponderant role as orchestrators of innovation by adjusting their services to the requirements of each innovation process phase. Moreover, this work highlights inconsistencies between offer (clusters) and demand (SMEs) constraining the creation of a culture of innovation, particularly stressing communication problems. Hence, the integration of innovative communication channels, having the potential to increase the effectiveness of communication strategies between cluster managers and SMEs, are key for facilitating a culture of innovation in organizations, especially in SMEs. In this case, we suggest exploring different elements around the industry 4.0 in order to define the characteristics of such communication channels, particularly those supporting the acquisition, assimilation and transformation of internal and external knowledge into innovation. 

A part of this study was presented as oral presentation at the "24th International Conference on Production Research (ICPR 2017)" in Poznan, Poland from July 30 to August 3, 20017.