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SMEs and Their Peripheral Innovation Environment: Reflections from a Finnish Case

As it has now been widely argued, innovation is ever more seldom the product of isolated firms but usually requires a combination of multiple technologies, skills and competences, part of which have to be acquired from outside the boundaries of the innovating firm. As the literature on regional systems of innovation and other territorial innovation models suggests, the region is the most appropriate spatial level for investigating and understanding the nature of firms’ external knowledge acquisition in their innovation processes, as well as for identifying the critical actors and factors contributing to them. Unlike the majority of studies focusing on the innovation activities of firms at the regional level, this paper focuses not on the actual importance of different location factors, but on the perceptions of small- and medium-sized firms entrepreneurs of the quality of different factors in their regional innovation environment. By identifying differences between the perceptions of innovative and less-innovative firms, this study contributes to the literature on innovation as a regional-level phenomenon, and also tentatively puts forward some managerial and policy implications, as well as suggestions for further research.