Abstract:

Developing economies are characterized by fragmented incentives towards any systemic or structural change. In those contexts, different actors show preliminary attempts toward systemic shifts like Circular Economy, SMEs among others. Recognizing the fact that those firms may not possess adequate resources and proper infrastructure to develop those practices alone open innovation approach is advocated. Open innovation involves different functional process which rely on the collaboration of stakeholders, for this reason this study aims to analyze how different forms of collaboration can contribute in proper implementation of CE and industry 4.0 in SME sector through open and responsible research and innovation processes. Focusing on process of the shift of SME sector towards CE, this research aims to evaluate how those firms “internalize-externalize the innovation” and know-how, and; expand their market to turn this innovation into higher profits considering the sensitivity towards the environmental, social and economic issues. Considering the Albanian cases this study comprehensively tackle how multi-faceted collaboration can deeply amplify innovative ideas and decomposes/simply the complex challenges of sustainable development.  The data collected through likert scale questionnaire are analyses and synthetized using SPSS v24 for the description and Amos v24 for CFA and SEM (Semi-structural Equation Modeling) analysis. Interestingly the main result is that technological innovation capacity has higher impact on the CE implementation capacity than the CE innovation capability itself and as assumed open and responsible research and innovation has significant impact in CE implementation. Finally, a good implementation of CE results in increased performance of environmental, social and economic performance of SME sector in Albania. The novelty of the study consist on the measurement of the effect Open and Responsible Research and Innovation has CE implementation and the study recommends further analysis regarding value creation for self and value creation for others.