Non-R&D Innovation Patterns Of SMEs And Their Impact On Firm’s Business Performance

In many past years, when we try to explain the innovative capability of a firm, an industry or a country, research and development would always be the most important part. However, many researches found that actually "innovation methods" without R&D such as service innovation, marketing innovation or even some know-how based on experience would also bring innovative capability and economic benefits. These non-R&D innovation activities are what we are concerned about. Based on past literature and exploration case studies, we come up with a SMEs’non-R&D innovation activity theoretic framework. We get five non-R&D innovation patterns after an exploration analysis, which are product and service innovation, imitation and design, external technology adoption and modification, organization structure and organization process innovation ("organizational innovation" for short) and marketing innovation. According to the empirical study result, we find that four non-R&D innovation patterns (except for imitation and design) have positive impacts on SMEs’ business performance. Firms’dynamic capacities mediate the relationship between organizational innovation pattern and SMEs’business performance. The same result happens between the relationship between marketing innovation pattern and SMEs’ business performace. What’s more, we find that actually only external technology adoption and modification pattern and organizational innovation pattern do have positive impacts on SMEs’financial performance while the whole four patterns have positive impacts on SMEs’innovation performance.