Communities and managerial competencies supporting SMEs innovation networking: a longitudinal case study

During the last few decades it has become evident that Small and Medium-sized enterprises should heavily rely on networking in order to get access to innovation and to larger knowledge bases. The paper analyses the birth and the evolution over time of an Italian Innovation Community created by a group of SMEs in search for innovation. Coming from quite different businesses, those SMEs converged around a challenging project in the field of biomedical and re-habilitation devices. The aim of the paper is twofold: (1) to investigate what kind of competences and tasks have to accomplished in order to effectively manage an IC and what managerial roles (promotors) emerge by crossing competences and tasks; (2) to what extent community members’ absorptive capacity influences their ability to acquire and exploit innovation generated by the community. Using an in-depth longitudinal case study analysis we individuated three different stages in community evolution and we studied which promotor roles emerged in each stage and what is the relationship among them and community performance. Furthermore we investigated to what extent existing knowledge base in the specific domain and previous experiences in networking influenced community members’ ability to exploit innovation. We found that a specific correspondence among competences and tasks is needed in order to guarantee community performance and that promotors should interact among themselves in order to get the community to its goal. About absorptive capacity, it emerges that prior experience and familiarity in networking are not predictive of new knowledge exploitation.