Understanding the business strategies of Small-Medium European Serial Innovators

This paper focuses on European small-medium ‘serial innovators’ at the beginning of the 1990s and provides an empirical basis to answer the following questions: who are the upstream specialized small-medium technology producers? Are there technologies in which they show a relative advantage? Which strategies do they pursue for the commercialisation of their technologies? By focusing on firms’ history, activities, and the description of events obtained by different data sources, we also investigates if technology based SMEs choose to implement a strategy based on the commercialisation of their technologies or if they invest in the complementary assets of production, marketing and distribution becoming “micro-chandlerian” firms. Through this analysis we are able to propose a classification of technology based SMEs’ strategies in the market for technology, in the market for embedded technologies and in the market for products.