Initiatives in benchmarking Innovation Management in small high-technology firms: A case study in the Brazilian digital communications manufacturing sector
The Brazilian government has been promoting innovation initiatives for small, medium and bigsized companies for the past years. Among its initiatives, a benchmarking program – developed by the Euvaldo Lodi Institute in Santa Catarina State, Brazil – was started, aiming that assessing the current performance and practice levels, regarding innovation in Brazilian SME and at comparing them against an international database containing data from more than a thousand firms from 32 countries. In this paper, we report how a small firm faced the challenges imposed by this benchmarking initiative. The firm in study was selected for the pilot project in the State of Santa Catarina, along with four other firms, due to their technology and product development-oriented strategies and for being awarded several times, state and nation-wide, for their R&D and innovation practices. We report the challenges imposed by the benchmarking program the firm needed to overcome and how the company achieved this objective, through bibliographical surveys and on-site visits to the company during the period 2006-2010 and we outline how the firm evolved since then and their current challenges for the forthcoming years. We conclude by assessing the gains of the firm in relation to their innovation management programme
Referência: URIONA, M.; DIAS, N.; VARVAKIS, G. Initiatives in benchmarking Innovation Management in small high-technology firms: A case study in the Brazilian digital communications manufacturing sector. 3rd International Symposium on Innovative Management Practices – European Research on Innovation and Management – ERIMA, 2010, Wiesbaden, Germany.