What innovation collaboration routes exist between enterprises?

What is it about?

The paper shows the challenges of collaboration between Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and larger enterprises. Collaboration is needed because enterprises with different sizes can complement each other on respectively exploring new ideas typically coming from SMEs and the structure, processes and resources typically available in larger enterprises. Through these collaborations successful innovation can be enabled. Three different routes for collaboration to enable innovation is shown, which require very different competences in SMEs and therefore SMEs need to know what the routes of 'demand-driven cooperation', 'supplier-driven cooperation' and 'partner-driven collaboration' imply.

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Why is it important?

Innovation is very important in business context because customer demands increase, resources get scarce and competition is high. Therefore society requires more and more advanced and 'out-of-the-box' thinking solutions. Here more efficient and effective collaboration between SMEs and larger enterprises can make a considerable contribution to society through development of solutions, which can provide more for less.

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