Timo Pihkala

Absorptive Capacity and Social Capital in Regional Innovation Systems: The Case of the Lahti Region in Finland

The recent theories of innovation suggest that there is great potential for innovation in the structural holes and weak links of the innovation system. Higher absorptive capacity enables an easier crossing over of structural holes in the innovation system, aided by social capital that is located in the social relationships of actors. However, the level of human and social interaction in regional innovation systems has been largely neglected as a research topic. Empirical research on a sample in the Lahti region in Finland suggested three forms of social capital: organisational bonding social capital, regional bridging social capital and personal creative social capital. Further analysis revealed three groups of actors’ interaction behaviour: Missionaries, House Mice and the Passive Resistance.

Facilitating SME Innovation Capability Through Business Networking

Innovation processes can be regarded as complex, dynamic, and a result of cumulative dynamic interaction and learning processes involving many actors. In this setting, private small‐ and medium‐sized businesses (SMEs) can be considered a key factor – as generators of new ideas, as entrepreneurs carrying out new ventures, and as partners for other local actors. This study focuses on the SME networks and their ability to participate in innovative processes directed at new value creation. We present a case study of the development of a young innovation network. Our focus in the case study is on the SMEs ability to carry out innovation and new value creation in a network. The key contribution of the study centers on the new understanding of the way SME innovation could be promoted through facilitated network development.

Teachers implementing entrepreneurship education: classroom practices

Purpose – This study aims to highlight the entrepreneurship education practices teachers use in their work. Another target is to analyze how these practices differ based on a number of background factors.Design/methodology/approach – This article presents a quantitative analysis of 521 teachers and other entrepreneurship education actors. The paper first examines the overall picture of entrepreneurship education practices. Then, after a factor analysis, the paper builds new sum measures of entrepreneurship education practices. Finally, the paper studies the teachers’ background information to further analyze the entrepreneurship education practices.Findings – The findings provide information on which methods appear to be used the most frequently in basic and upper secondary education, and how these practices vary between different school levels. The results also indicate that the perception teachers have of their own entrepreneurship education skills is closely connected to the implementation of entrepren...

Innovation barriers amongst clusters of European SMEs

Research on innovations and barriers to innovation has for a long time been concentrated on trying to find those mechanisms that would help in designing innovation-supporting policies at European, national and company level. Often these studies have, however, been looking at only one of the levels at a time, which has led to oversimplifications and misleading policy implications. This paper stems from the need to know more about how the innovativeness of smaller firms is related to contextual factors. The innovation process is seen as a cycle involving trial and error, where problems at some stages of development lead to a need to re-evaluate earlier stages in the innovation process. The barriers to innovation are not, however, the same for each firm; barriers may be expected to differ, for example, according to the size of the firm, the line of industry, and the degree of innovativeness of the firm. This study aims to show that there are distinct categories of firms behaving differently vis-a-vis barriers to innovation. The data includes survey responses from 1,240 firms from four European countries Belgium, Finland, Ireland and Sweden. In the analysis, eight factors causing innovation barriers emerged employment policy, financing, taxation, legislation, risk-propensity, competence and information, and external support. The findings suggest that the barriers to innovation should be studies from the decision-makers point of view. In further analysis, eight clusters were identified high innovation firms with market competition barriers, exogenous low innovative firms, low-innovation firms with competence and information barriers, high and low innovation firms with no barriers to innovation, medium innovative manufacturing firms, low-innovation service firms with employment policy barriers, medium innovation firms with financial barriers and low-innovation craftsmen and service firms. The study concludes that the inter-relation between different sets of barriers to innovation seems to hold more importance than has been recognised previously. Moreover, the barriers to innovation are not equally distributed among SMEs, but there are typical sets of barriers to innovation depending on the age, size, type of industry, and the innovativeness of the firm. As for policy implications the study suggests that more attention should be paid to lowering or removing barriers that in particular obstruct medium-innovative firms from innovating.

Entrepreneurship Education in Schools: Empirical Evidence on the Teacher's Role.

ABSTRACT Different approaches and methodologies for entrepreneurship education have been introduced for schools. However, a better theoretical and empirical understanding of the antecedents of entrepreneurship education is needed. The authors analyze what entrepreneurship education practices are used in schools and what role the school and the teacher are playing in determining the entrepreneurship education practices. The data cover school levels from basic to upper secondary education. The findings indicate that the training teachers have received in entrepreneurship seems to be the main factor determining the observable entrepreneurship education provided by the teachers. Further studies on the antecedents of entrepreneurship education are encouraged.

The Role of Owner-Managers' Psychological Ownership in SME Strategic Behaviour

Abstract According to the theory of psychological ownership, the feeling of ownership does not necessitate legal ownership, and may emerge when a person gets to know the target intimately, controls it and invests in it. We focus in this study on owner-managers of small enterprises, and build on the fundamental assumption that psychological ownership and legal business ownership are not mutually exclusive. Our data from 150 Finnish SMEs supports the assumption that these owner-managers may have strong feelings of psychological ownership that influence their ability to manage the firm purely as an economic instrument.

A framework for a network-level performance measurement system in SME networks

The present study aims to present a theoretical framework for a network-level performance measurement system. The suggested framework for the performance measurement system is composed of the factors that enable and cause the productivity and profitability of the network form of organisation. The framework developed in this study can be divided into six subdimensions: (1) network culture, (2) resources and competences, (3) models of action, (4) internal processes, (5) customer perspective and (6) financial indicators of the network. We argue that this framework provides research opportunities to study the performance of the network form of organisation; but even more importantly, it provides a unique framework to analyse and develop network organisations in practice.

Management and change in turbulent times: How do Russian small business managers perceive the development of their business environment?

This paper focuses on the management of small businesses in Russia. Despite the growing importance of the Russian small business sector, there are surprisingly few empirical studies focusing on this topic. As the business environment in Russia is repeatedly noted to be in constant change, the purpose of the paper is to explore Russian owner‐managers perceptions of the development of their business environment from 2000 to 2004. The paper reports the results of a survey conducted among 164 business managers in North‐West Russia. The results indicate that Russian owner‐managers tend to monitor changes in the business environment and adapt their management accordingly, if not beforehand. However, the results are not unambiguous, as the study found wide variations in the extent to which gap the managers monitored and adapted to perceived changes in the business environment.

OPERATIONALIZING SME NETWORK RESOURCES

In presenting two perspectives through which SME networking can be discussed, namely a system view and a view that considers networks as entities, this paper aims to contribute to the current discourse on SME network resources. A network-level performance measurement system emphasizes win-win situations in a network between the leader company and the other members of the network. The main objective of the present paper is to develop a measurement system for analyzing the value of resources and competencies in a production network, which can be used to complement existing network-level performance measurement systems. By taking into account the resources in a network environment in this way, the value of the whole network and its resources comes to represent the sum of the resources fit with customer needs, the co-operation ability and willingness of the network, and the entrepreneurial capability of the network to create new business opportunities.

Creating a measurement tool for entrepreneurship education: a participatory development approach

The aim of this paper is to illustrate and model the construction of a measurement tool for entrepreneurship education where the tool itself is targeted toward Finnish teachers working in primary and secondary education. This study represents participatory action research (Argyris 1993) as the research context has been facilitated and provided by the researchers, and where the study objects initiate, respond, and develop their activities, thereby reforming the context further. The presented case is an illustration of the building of a Measurement Tool for Entrepreneurship Education, prepared in an ESF-funded project. In this study we present multi-method, multi-investigator, multiple data, and multiple theory triangulation (Denzin 1988) settings. From the data, the phases of the measurement tool construction were identified. Our aim is to present the process in order to link the theory and practice of entrepreneurship education. Here, a broad and multilayered definition of entrepreneurship education is utilized, and by making these aspects explicit the tool itself has a role not only as a teacher’s self-evaluation kit but also as a steering system for developing schools and regions on a larger scale.