Gonzalo Maldonado Guzmán

Innovation and Performance in Latin-American Small Family Firms

The study of innovation in family firms is gaining more and more interest among researchers and academics. Although it is a relatively recent issue in the literature, there is not enough theoretical and empirical evidence of the existing relationship with other constructs, such as the case of business performance. Therefore, using a sample of 1,400 family small businesses from 20 Latin American countries and applying a structural equations modeling of second order, which allows to know in greater depth the relationship between innovation and business performance. The fundamental objective of this empirical study is to investigate the relationship between innovation and business performance in family small business in Latin America. The results indicate that the innovation has a significant positive effect on the business performance of Latin American family small business.

The relationship between knowledge management and innovation level in Mexican SMEs: empirical evidence: Institutions, Behaviors and Outcomes

The transformation of the current society from an industry-based economy to a knowledge management and innovation-based economy is changing the design and implementation of business strategies and the nature of the competition among the organizations which are mainly small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). They struggle to survive in a market which is more demanding and competitive, so they see knowledge management as one of the most effective strategies that may help to enable the innovation activities into the businesses. For these reasons, this research paper has as a main goal to analyze the relationship between knowledge management and innovation in Mexican SMEs. The empirical analysis used 125 manufacturing SMEs (each SME having from 20 to 250 employees) as a sample to be carried out. The obtained results indicate that knowledge management has a positive impact in products, process, and management systems innovation.

Innovation, Information Technology and Performance: An Examination of the Iberoamerican SMEs Context

Innovation is considered an important factor and key variable to improve both the use and adoption of information and communication technologies as well as to achieve better business performance levels in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). At the same time, an appropriate alignment of innovation activities with the use of information technologies helps businesses to improve their levels of performance. The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical research that closely examines the current relationship among innovation, information and communication technologies, and SMEs performance. For this, a sample of 1989 enterprises was obtained from 21 countries in Iberoamerica. The results have revealed that innovation has a positive and significant impact on both information and communication technologies (ICT) and SMEs performance.

La Colaboración como Estrategia de Marketing en la Pyme de México: una evidencia empírica .

La colaboracion entre las organizaciones es una estrategia de marketing que esta ganando cada vez mas adeptos en un mercado caracterizado por un alto nivel de competitividad y globalizacion. Es por ello que la colaboracion permite que las pequenas y medianas empresas (Pymes) participantes obtengan mayores beneficios que los que pudieran lograr trabajando de manera individual, ya que facilita el intercambio de informacion, conocimientos y experiencias entre los trabajadores. Por lo tanto, este trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar el nivel de colaboracion en la Pyme de Aguascalientes. El analisis empirico se llevo a cabo con una muestra de 300 Pymes de 5 a 250 trabajadores. Los resultados obtenidos muestran que la reduccion de costos de las compras, el desempeno financiero y el nivel de innovacion tienen efectos positivos significativos en la colaboracion entre las empresas.