26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are widely accepted as the drivers of economic growth. SMEs depend on innovation for survival. The literature indicates that innovation performance can be improved through collaboration with other organisations. For SMEs, however, spending valuable resources collaborating with organisations that do not add value, could lead to a decrease in innovation performance. This paper explores the effect of collaborating with eleven different actor types identified from the literature from both a structural as well as relational network perspective. We performed the investigation for a group of 19 SMEs based in Gauteng and surrounding areas in South Africa. From a structural perspective, the results show that having more direct connections to firms from other sectors, science partners, and government increases a firm’s innovation performance with regards to the novelty of innovation. The performance with regards to the novelty of innovation increases even more if some of the aforementioned collaborators are international organisations. From a relational perspective, interacting with these types of collaborators more frequently improved the sample firm’s innovation performance with regards to novelty.