Research On Innovation Of Small And Medium-sized Enterprises

A various of comprehensive studies regarding technological innovation have been studied by famous scholars in the world since J. Schumpeter put forward the innovation theory in the early of last century, in which technological innovation is viewed as the source of economy growth and an effective way of promoting knowledge-based economy development. Especially, in recent years a stream of burgeoning literatures on competitive importance of innovation and the linkage between innovation and enterprise performance clearly have indicated that intense competition in the marketplace is forcing enterprises to examine different ways by which they could enhance or retain their competitive advantage. In the meantime, a lot of research studies both at home and abroad have attested that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the most active innovative cluster and the main force for industrialization of achievements in scientific research. As a result, studies of technological innovation for SMEs have drawn more and more attention, and are becomIng a very important research field of innovation today. It is well known that SMEs in China have flourished over the past two decades and have been playing a major role in national economy. SMEs are of increasing significance in terms of wealth creation and numbers employed. According to the third Chinese Industry Census in 1995, the total number of SMEs which is defined in the Chinese context as entities with fewer than one thousand employees accounted for 99.32 percent of all enterprises and the total in employment of SMEs is more than 68 percent of China抯 industry workforce. At the same time, an obvious trend of last decade is the strong growth in the number of smaller business, which suggests that it is SMEs, rather than big enterprises, offering a large part of GDP and employment potential. On the other hand, experiences abroad and practices at home show that SMEs in China is not so advanced as compared to some developed countries in accordance with the performance of technological innovation. There exist a lot of problems remaining to be studied. Therefore, studying the mechanism of innovation, analyzing the characteristics and current situation of innovation in SMEs and exploring the innovation strategies as well as the principles of iii policy-making for SMEs have a far-reaching significance for advancing the technological innovation of SMEs in China. This dissertation consists of five chapters and deals with the following issues: First of all, in view of the debate concerning the relationship between innovation and enterprise scale, which has been a hot topic in innovation research field for a long times some detailed discussions have been carried out through the comparison analyses to research achievements gained by scholars of different academic point-views in the world. As a result of this, it is pointed out that SMEs can also play the same role as large enterprises in technological innovation process. In connection with the issue about the driving mechanism of innovation, many scholars worked hard to explore what driving force changed scientific research fruits into a various of commodities, proposing a serial of theories and models of innovation driving mechanism and making a great contribution to the research in this field. The second chapter studies not only the product and imitation innovation which are distinguishing features of innovation in SMEs, but also puts a stress on a...