Innovation practices within small to medium-sized mechanically-based manufacturers

Manufacturing SMEs remain an underdeveloped area of interest in the literature on innovation. SMEs whose principal skill sets are mechanical in nature (MechSMEs) and that serve multiple customer groups offer a particularly rich context for the study of innovation practices that are mostly under the control of the firm’s managers. This empirically-based paper uses case studies based on multiple units of analysis within each firm so that the overall innovation practices of four mature firms (average firm age 45 years, minimum 20 years) and the practices used within thirteen specif ic innovations (both product and process innovations) were studied. This combination of studying firm-specific and innovation-specific practices was used to construct a picture of the most important innovation practices within each firm.Based on the identification of the two most innovative firms, the findings indicate that approximately half of these firms’ innovation practices were shared with the other firms, while the other half of the practices were found to be either idiosyncratic or only partially shared. Of particular interest were fifteen innovation practices that were particularly influential within the two most innovative firms.