Role of Technological Innovations for Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship

In recent years, technological innovations have emerged as an important source of competitive strength, and firms in many industries have achieved success by competing through innovation. Taking the business perspective of a small enterprise with focused technological capabilities, we examine here the role of innovations for competitiveness. We present a framework that is useful for classifying and characterising different types of technological innovations and describe their impact on firms' capabilities. The narrow focus of small enterprises enables them to develop into niche players with specialised capabilities; however, it often prevents them from offering complete products or services. In this context, we identify and discuss the needs of such enterprises for survival and growth and describe two alternative models of support to improve the success rate.