Coordination mechanisms for international innovation in SMEs: effects on time-to-market and R&D task complexity as a moderator

As SMEs increasingly internationalize their innovation activities, our study strives to improve our understanding of the coordination mechanisms that SMEs can adopt to orchestrate these activities. Building on the evolutionary theory of organizations, we link three established coordination mechanism...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Small business economics 2016-02, Vol.46 (2), p.273-294
Main Authors: Palmié, Maximilian, Zeschky, Marco, Winterhalter, Stephan, Sauter, Philipp Walter, Haefner, Naomi, Gassmann, Oliver
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Business and Management
Business entities
Business innovation
Centralization
Coordination
Corporate strategies
Employees
Entrepreneurship
Evolutionary theories
Formalization
Hypotheses
Industrial Organization
Innovations
International
Management
Market entry
Microeconomics
Multinational corporations
Organizational structure
Product innovation
R&D
Research & development
Small & medium sized enterprises-SME
Small business
Socialization
Statistical analysis
Subsidiary companies
Task complexity
Technological change
Time to market
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Summary:As SMEs increasingly internationalize their innovation activities, our study strives to improve our understanding of the coordination mechanisms that SMEs can adopt to orchestrate these activities. Building on the evolutionary theory of organizations, we link three established coordination mechanisms (centralization, formalization, and socialization) to the time-to-market of SMEs' product innovations. We also argue that the complexity of the internationalized R&D tasks moderates the relationship between the three coordination mechanisms and time-to-market. Survey data from 103 SMEs with international innovation activities broadly support our theoretical account. With respect to the main effects, our findings suggest that a high degree of centralization tends to prolong the time-to-market, whereas formalization tends to shorten it. The moderation results further indicate that centralization can become more beneficial when a firm internationalizes highly complex R&D tasks, while formalization tends to become less beneficial with increasing task complexity. Main and moderation effects with respect to socialization are inconclusive. We discuss the implications of these findings for the academic literature and management practice.
ISSN:0921-898X
1573-0913
DOI:10.1007/s11187-015-9683-8