Technological diversification within UK’s small serial innovators

Abstract

This paper investigates the determinants of technological diversification among UK’s small serial innovators (SSIs). Using a longitudinal study of 339 UK-based small businesses accounting for almost 7000 patents between 1990 and 2006, this study constitutes the first empirical examination of technological diversification among SMEs in the literature. Results demonstrate that technological diversification is not solely a large firm activity, challenging the dominant view that innovative SMEs are extremely focused and specialised players with little technological diversification. Our findings suggest a nonlinear (i.e. inverse-U-shaped) relationship between the level of technological opportunities in the environment and the SSIs’ degree of technological diversification. This points to a trade-off between processes of exploration and exploitation across increasingly volatile technology regimes. The paper also demonstrates that small firms with impactful innovations focus their innovative activity around similar technological capabilities while firms that have introduced platform technologies in the past are more likely to engage in technological diversification.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-015-9698-1
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School
Additional Information: © The Author(s) 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Uncontrolled Keywords: diversification,small serial innovators,SME,technological opportunity,relatedness,fractional response model,Economics and Econometrics,General Business,Management and Accounting
Publication ISSN: 1573-0913
Last Modified: 29 Oct 2024 13:22
Date Deposited: 08 Feb 2016 11:30
Full Text Link: http://link.spr ... 1187-015-9698-1
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2016-06
Published Online Date: 2016-01-30
Accepted Date: 2015-12-29
Authors: Corradini, Carlo (ORCID Profile 0000-0001-9164-4108)
Demirel, Pelin
Battisti, Giuliana

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