The impact of an entrepreneur educational attainment and professional experience on the innovation activity of smes: the case of Wielkopolska region

The article attempts to assess the impact of entrepreneurs' education and professional experience on the innovation activity of the companies they run. Its authors relied on the findings of their own survey, dating back to 2014, covering 54 SMEs based in the Polish region of Wielkopolska. The study concentrated on vari- ous aspects of the companies' innovation as pursued in 2011-2013. The authors assumed that SME innovation is a function of entrepreneur competencies, which in turn depend on their formal educational attainment, experience acquired while working in the overall R&D sector and the extent to which they benefited from advisory services offered by business-support institutions. In the course of their research, the authors fully proved the hypothesis concerning entrepreneurs' formal education and partially supported the remaining ones (with respect to some of the innovation criteria adopted for the study). They established a direct link between professional experience in the R&D sector and the use of advisory services on the one hand and the originality of product innovations on the other. A similar relationship has been discovered between the training of business proprietors and the number of process innovations generated by their organizations.