Innovation: The Key to Success in Small Firms - ARCHIVED

This study examines the differences in strategies and activities pursued by a sample of more-successful and less-successful group of growing small- and medium-sized enterprises. Amongst other matters, it examines different functional strategies -- the importance of management, human resource practices, marketing, financing, and the innovativeness of the firm. Innovative activities are the most important determinants of success; that is, for a wide range of industries, they serve to discriminate between the more- and the less-successful firms better than any other variable. Almost all of the strategy questions that relate to innovative activity receive higher scores from the more-successful group of firms than from the less-successful group of firms. This is also the case for innovative activities -- whether a firm possesses an R&D unit, its expenditure on R&D relative to total investment, and its R&D-to-sales ratio.