Innova - "Exploratory Team report on High-Growth Innovative SMEs"

Small and Medium Sized enterprises are the backbone of all economies and are the key source of economic growth, dynamism and flexibility in advanced industrialized countries, as well as in emerging and developing economies. Within the SME universe, there is a group that has received the greatest attention over the past years, the high-growth SMEs or “gazelles”.

Despite the attention devoted to growth and performance, there is little literature on high-growth SMEs, gazelles, and research is not developed and the is a lack of policy initiatives designed for them.

Summary

Objectives

This study highlights that growth is related to a company’s ability to innovate not only products and processes but also organizational and managerial practices or administrative innovation, related to management-oriented processes such as structure, human resource management, and accounting systems. Attention is therefore directed to gazelles operating as service firms, developing new business models of service development.

This study turned its attention on answering following questions:

What is the challenge for policy makers?
How could trans-national cooperation contribute to address the challenge?
What could be the added value to solve the problem through trans-national cooperation?
What are the activities to be developed at trans-national level?
Who are the potential actors to drive the agenda for trans-national cooperation further?
Which are the funding instruments to implement the proposed action?
How can the impact of the proposed action be leveradged?

Authors: