مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

It is widely accepted that in a time of advanced technologies and greater flows of information, a firm’s ability to innovate has become a central driver of growth, competitiveness and sustainability (OECD, 2013; GII, 2014; EU, 2014). Over the last thirty and odd years, SMEs have been regarded as a driving force of innovation and economic performance due to their nimbleness and flexibility (Birch, 1981; Piore and Sabel, 1984; Audretsch, 2003; UNECE, 2011. Therefore, innovative SMEs are an important policy target for many governments. This paper aims at contributing knowledge on the modes of innovation employed by SMEs in the context of post-Soviet transition economies (PSTE). In particular, this study addresses the following research question: What is the most effective mode of innovation in PSTE? It is a rather unexplored research area in this strand of the literature that can help to identify and discuss possible country specificities, which may produce relevant implications for multi-level policy coordination and different policy mixes (Vitola, 2015).

The debate on STI/DUI modes of innovation has attracted interest among international scholars. However, the majority of in-country analyses on the modes of innovation have mainly focused on developed countries that operate in market economies (Apanasovich, 2014). These studies have shown that firms that combine STI and DUI modes of learning are more likely to innovate than those relying on the STI and DUI mode alone in Denmark, Norway and Sweden (Isaksen and Nilsson, 2013; Aslesen et al., 2012) and Canada (Amara et al., 2008). However, other studies developed in Spain, China (Chen et al., 2011), Portugal and Colombia (Malaver and Vargas, 2013) show more ambiguous results. This might lead to a context-specific adoption of innovation modes that we aim at exploring in further depth. In PSTE, studies that analyze the effect of modes of innovation on the performance of firms are absent, thus motivating this new research endeavor. The peculiarities of these countries are, on the negative side, the lack of financial capital, innovation management experience and state-of-theart technology, while, on the positive side, a rather high level of educated human capital (Aidis, et al., 2008; Rees and Miazhevich, 2009; Fink, et al., 2009).

For the sake of completeness, in this paper, the impact of STI and DUI modes is studied not only on technological innovation (i.e. product and/or process innovation), but also on organizational innovation that represents a “non-technological” type of innovation. Yet, it is relevant for businesses that want to be competitive in current globalized markets. In addition, the methodology of measuring the DUI mode is enriched by adding new indicators that capture learning-by-doing and by-using drivers vis-à-vis most studies that focus and measure the learning-by-interaction driver alone.