Seeking innovation: The research protocol for SMEs' networking.

Area of Science:

• Business and Management
• Computer Science
• Information Science

Background:

• Small- to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are crucial for innovation.
• Understanding SMEs' innovation-seeking behavior through networking is vital.
• Existing methods for analyzing innovation needs in networking databases require refinement.

Purpose of the Study:

• To establish a research protocol for classifying innovation-seeking behavior in SMEs.
• To analyze knowledge needs expressed in Enterprise Europe Network (EEN) databases.
• To differentiate between exploitative and explorative innovation strategies.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a dataset of 9301 networking offers from the EEN database.
• Employed semi-automatic data acquisition using the rvest R package.
• Applied static word embedding models (CBoW, Skip-Gram, GloVe) and TF-IDF for text classification.

Main Results:

• A balanced dataset of exploitative (51%) and explorative (49%) innovation offers was analyzed.
• High prediction performance was achieved with AUC scores of 0.887 (overall), 0.878 (exploratory), and 0.857 (exploitative).
• SMEs emphasize explorative innovation, prioritizing smart technologies and global cooperation in networking.

Conclusions:

• The research protocol effectively categorizes SME innovation-seeking behavior using word embeddings.
• While robust, the protocol acknowledges limitations due to the inherent entropy in networking outcomes.
• SMEs pursuing exploitative innovation show greater interest in current IT and software solutions.