文章基本信息

标题：Rebuilding a Cluster While Protecting Knowledge within Low-Medium-Tech Supplier SMEs: A Spanish and French Comparison
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作者：Martine Gadille ; Juan Ramón Gallego-Bono
期刊名称：Sustainability
印刷版ISSN：2071-1050
出版年度：2021
卷号：13
期号：20
页码：11313
DOI：10.3390/su132011313
语种：English
出版社：MDPI, Open Access Journal
摘要：Most of SMEs are engaged in open innovation practices, but they do not benefit from open innovation or from patenting in the same way as larger firms do. At the same time SMEs, as territorialized suppliers, play a crucial role within evolving regional specialization. In this context the purpose of our study is to examine how low and medium technology supplier SMEs learn and organize themselves at a territorial level to address the challenge of IP protection in an open innovation paradigm. We used a qualitative method with a longitudinal multi-case study involving 27 companies with a historical lance to compare the territorial dynamics of knowledge protection within clustered supplier SMEs in two European regions. The results show they protect their knowledge by learning how to design, in a direct relationship with clients, customized complex technological products to develop a new organizational matrix of multidisciplinary knowledge that reveals itself difficult to imitate within the clusters. They also cope with other supplier firms across sectors even if they show societal path dependencies in the way to build cooperation. This dynamic has given birth to changing structural relationships among regionally clustered SMEs and between them and large firms.