Abstract:

Innovation has been proposed as a new paradigm for the management of innovation (Chesbrough, 2003; Gassmann, 2006). According to Chesbrough it is defined as the use of inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and to expand the markets for external use of innovation (Chesbrough et al., 2006). According to Lichtenthaler it comprises outside-in and inside-out movements of technologies and ideas (Lichtenthaler, 2008). Unfortunately, innovation till so far it has mainly been analyzed in large, high-tech multinational enterprises (MNEs) drawing on in-depth interviews and case studies (e.g. Kirschbaum, 2005; Chesbrough, 2003). Even if in some studies it treat problems accordingly to peculiarities of SMEs, those studies are limited because are focus on very specific industries (Lecocq and Demil, 2006). Lichtenthaler (2008) studies these problems in order to identify the incidence of open innovation in a broader sample of enterprises. The purpose of this paper is to present a synthesis of our research on barriers on innovation on Romanian SMEs performed in Romania. We distributed our questionnaires to companies from different activities and business model implementations based all over Romania (with a share of 28% for capital city), and then processed the answers using different statistical packages. As the literature related to innovation reveals few empirical evidence on surveys focused on Romanian SMEs innovation practices and results, our analysis seeks to presents some results obtained on more than 1500 companies.