Innovation and SMEs: Misaligned perspectives and goals among entrepreneurs, academics, and policy makers

The present research stems from the results of a survey on the innovativeness of a sample of Italian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). These results, largely based on self-reported data by entrepreneurs or managers, showed that the considered SMEs were important developers of radical innovations in contrast with data published by local institutions. This misalignment between the entrepreneurs’ opinions and the official data, that are typically defined and selected by academics and policy makers, motivated a new research aimed at analyzing the intimate reasons for it. The research is rooted in the social construction of innovation perspective and is based on interviews with the three main innovation stakeholders, identified as: entrepreneurs, academics, and policy makers. The results show the existence of deeply different perspectives concerning innovation, starting from its definition, to the effective policies to promote it, to the role of intermediary institutions and so on. Sometimes, these views show diverging goals among the stakeholders and, consequently, contrasting opinions on effective supporting policies. These results can partly explain the misalignment between the survey's output and “institutional” data and, maybe, also the failure of many supporting initiatives that are largely documented by our survey and also by literature. The aim of the paper is to investigate the different perspectives on innovation held by the considered stakeholders, highlighting the points of major contrast together with similarities in order to provide new insights into the problem.