Strategic influences of technological innovation in Greece

This exploratory paper analyses the 'importance' and 'awareness' of a set of established 'strategic' influences of technological innovation in the context of a European newly-industrialized country. The author interviewed 105 Greek manufacturing firms (mainly SMEs) and measured their perceived innovation rate as well as 17 'strategic' factors regarding top-management practices and characteristics Using correlation and regression analysis the initial group of factors was reduced to a subset of five 'major importance' influences of innovation, namely: incorporation of technology plans in the business strategy, managerial attitude towards risk, perceived intensity of competition and rate of change of customer needs, and finally status of the CEO (owner-CEOs were associated with higher innovation rate than appointed CEOs). The 'statistical' results are exploratory and have to be treated with caution, as they are highly dependent on the accuracy of the respondents' perception of their company's innovation rate and top-management practices and characteristics. The 'statistical' results were then compared with the managers' perception on the important factors determining innovation (also measured during the interviews), Overall the perceptual analysis confirmed the significance of the statistically important variables, with the exception of a disagreement in the direction of association between the status of the CEO and the rate of innovation. In general, top-management characteristics proved more important 'strategic' influences of innovation for the Greek SMEs than corporate practices. The study also indicated that the important influences of innovation were generally scarce in the Greek institutional context. The highly innovative companies were the ones to overcome country-specific innovation barriers such as the low supply of technology, the low level of competition and the risk-averse national culture.