Resumen de Networking: small firm´s gate to competitiveness
Vinit Parida, María Pemartín González-Adalid
Innovation process has been widely studied in the business environments and it is really important to the competitiveness and survival of firms. Besides, in a global context, where product innovation has become increasingly more challenging, SMEs are even more dependenton external resources because the process of NPD is becoming more complex. In this context, networking has been considered as an alternative and potentially complementary solution that could help SMEs to overcome their innovation problems. Even when networking can be viewed from several perspectives, this study focuses on two important aspects: the networking capability and the network configuration. Our main purpose is to examine how both variables influence small firm innovativeness and firm performance. The analysis is based on 291 small Swedish firms. The results show that network configuration is influence positively firm innovativeness, and that NC has a strong positive impact on innovation and firm performance
