Rebuilding a Cluster While Protecting Knowledge within Low-Medium-Tech Supplier SMEs: A Spanish and French Comparison

Abstract

Most of SMEs are engaged in open innovation practices, but they do not benefit from open innovation or from patenting in the same way as larger firms do. At the same time SMEs, as territorialized suppliers, play a crucial role within evolving regional specialization. In this context the purpose of our study is to examine how low and medium technology supplier SMEs learn and organize themselves at a territorial level to address the challenge of IP protection in an open innovation paradigm. We used a qualitative method with a longitudinal multi-case study involving 27 companies with a historical lance to compare the territorial dynamics of knowledge protection within clustered supplier SMEs in two European regions. The results show they protect their knowledge by learning how to design, in a direct relationship with clients, customized complex technological products to develop a new organizational matrix of multidisciplinary knowledge that reveals itself difficult to imitate within the clusters. They also cope with other supplier firms across sectors even if they show societal path dependencies in the way to build cooperation. This dynamic has given birth to changing structural relationships among regionally clustered SMEs and between them and large firms.

A Territorial-Driven Approach to Capture the Transformative Momentum of the Social Economy Especially from the Agricultural Cooperatives

“…The growth of this productive diversity makes the same (more dynamic) local actors belong to and vitalize different practice and epistemic communities, which operate with different values, organizations, and knowledge. This process is going to have a special scope in terms of creating a space of structural coherence when the activities of these pioneering actors develop simultaneously, not only in different links of the sugar value chain but also in various value chain activities (of clusters and economic sectors) [48].…”

Digitalización para las pequeñas y medianas empresas

“…Este plan, elaborado por AMTEGA (Axencia para a Modernización Tecnolóxica) y la Xunta de Galicia, tiene por objetivo que Galicia sea reconocida como una región de vanguardia en el campo de las tecnologías 5G. Entre los principales ejes de actuación, se encuentran las transformaciones tecnológicas como la realidad virtual, la robótica y el Big Data (AMTEGA, 2018) Una de las medidas que contempla el plan es la digitalización de las pequeñas y medianas empresas en Galicia, las cuáles invierten un 50% menos que la media europea en nuevas tecnologías y 35% en marketing digital (Gadille y Gallego-Bono, 2021;Naderi et al, 2019). Para ello se proponen diferentes iniciativas como la que es analizada en este artículo: la creación de una tarjeta de fidelización.…”