Open innovation has been widely implemented in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with the aim of influencing business promotion, value gain, and economic empowerment. However, little is known about the processes used to implement open innovation in SMEs and the associated challenges and benefits. SMEs and Open Innovation: Global Cases and Initiatives unites knowledge on how SMEs can apply open innovation strategies to development by incorporating academic, entrepreneurial, institutional, research, and empirical cases. This book discusses diverse policy, economic, and cultural issues, including numerous opportunities and challenges surrounding open innovation strategies; studies relevant risks and risk management; analyzes SMEs evolution pattern on adopting open innovation strategies through available measurable criteria; and assists practitioners in designing action plans to empower SMEs.

With the globalization process, firms are seeking to expand their activities to international markets but are also “feeling” expanded competition from abroad. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), though seeking to expand abroad, have particularities that hinder their natural international expansion path due to particular barriers and challenges that most multinational firms have already overcome. Cases on Internationalization Challenges for SMEs provides a set of case studies on the internationalization of SMEs in order to share the latest empirical research findings in the field of internationalization in the context of a globalized world, and which considers a highly competitive international business setting. This includes examining the main reasons for the success or failure of the process of internationalization of SMEs and their inherent activities. Covering topics that include competitive advantage, export performance, and inward internationalization, this book targets managers, executives, and entrepreneurs concerned with how to adapt their companies to a fast-changing international business environment, how to conduct internationalization strategies, how to choose the most adequate international entry modes, and how to adapt their products and strategies to international markets. It is also suited for academicians, researchers, and students in the field of management.

The concept of open innovation (OI) has become a very popular topic during the last decade, with increasing number of SMEs embracing OI practices to gain competitive advantage. This edited volume is a timely opportunity to gather research on OI in SMEs, to investigate how OI is managed and implemented to determine the peculiarities compared to OI management in large companies, and to specify the consequences for future OI research.The book offers insights into the following topics: The state of the art on open innovation in SMEs; adopting open innovation in SMEs; interorganizational networks and innovation ecosystems; sectoral patterns of open innovation in SMEs; and measuring, evaluating and stimulating open innovation in SMEs.

Smaller companies are abundant in the business realm and outnumber large companies by a wide margin. To maintain a competitive edge against other businesses, companies must ensure the most effective strategies and procedures are in place. This is particularly critical in smaller business environments that have fewer resources. Start-Ups and SMEs: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a vital reference source that examines the strategies and concepts that will assist small and medium-sized enterprises to achieve competitiveness. It also explores the latest advances and developments for creating a system of shared values and beliefs in small business environments. Highlighting a range of topics such as entrepreneurship, innovative behavior, and organizational sustainability, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for entrepreneurs, business managers, executives, managing directors, academicians, business professionals, researchers, and graduate-level students.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th IFIP WG 5.5 Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises, PRO-VE 2013, held in Dresden, Germany, in September/October 2013. The 75 revised papers were carefully selected for inclusion in this volume. They provide a comprehensive overview of identified challenges and recent advances in various collaborative network (CN) domains and their applications with a particular focus on the support for reindustrialization. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: product-service ecosystems; innovation in networks; strategies to build collaborative networks; collaboration related processes and performance; models and meta-models of collaboration; cloud-based support to collaborative networks; collaborative platforms; services and service design; sustainable collaborative networks; event-driven collaborative networks; social-semantic enterprise; and risks and trust.

Collaboration among industry, universities and research institutes plays a vital role in stimulating open innovation, which in turn leads to new products, processes, services and business models. This book brings together a number of real-life examples of how to govern and manage open innovation collaboration projects more effectively, and provides timely insights that project consortia, governance boards and funding agencies can directly apply to implement and monitor projects and achieve greater impacts. All papers were written by recognized leading authorities with extensive experience in governance and management, and reveal how to capitalize on the potential of open innovation. This book shares multidisciplinary research perspectives on the potential benefits and challenges of collaboration, project management, and open innovation, as well as the management of complex organizational cultures and governance models.