FOSTERING FRONT-END INNOVATION PROCESS IN SMES

Encouraging innovation in SMEs has been in the hearth of policy incentives during the last years due to the importance SMEs play for economic development. Thus understanding of how to support SMEs with their innovation efforts is essential. This paper discusses about how to strengthen university-SME collaboration in order to support small business with their innovation efforts. More precisely it seeks answers to the question of how the university can support the front-end innovation process in SMEs and further, this paper tries to seek how this challenge can be connected to serve as a learning experience for university students. Linking previous research on small business management, entrepreneurship and innovation, this paper suggests a tentative concept to foster front-end innovation process in SME-context, students as key players. Further, this paper presents the empirical results of testing the proposed concept - InnoMarathon, where the multi-skilled teams consisting of university students provided idea screening and idea generation services to the local SMEs in order to help them to utilise new business opportunities. This means that a part of the front-end innovation process was outsourced from SMEs to students. As an output of InnoMarathon, SMEs could pick up a feasibility study of a new product or service concept. The findings after one organised InnoMarathon indicate that students can provide to SMEs promising new inventions for further development and commercialisation.