thanks
This work was partly supported by the French PIA project ‘Lorraine Université d’Excellence’ (Reference ANR-15-IDEX-04-LUE).
INNO4SME (2018 - 2020)
The INNOV4SME programme, which is financially supported by ICIT Lorraine Université d’Excellence (ANR Plan d’Investissements d’Avenir 2), aims to design a diagnostic tool capable of assessing the capabilities that SMEs need to develop as a priority in order to simultaneously improve their innovation and export performance. Ultimately, we plan to be able to distribute this tool to innovation and export support structures.
To guarantee the operational quality of this tool, the scientific research work needs to be based on real company cases. To this end, we are carrying out a comparative study of wine-producing SMEs in three wine-producing countries: France, Chile and Argentina. This comparative study will enable us to identify the synergies between innovation and export, as well as the impact of each country’s context on the innovation and export capacity of SMEs in this particular sector. The long-term objective is to extend this study to different sectors of activity in order to analyse the convergences and divergences.
The INNOV4SME programme follows on from an interdisciplinary thesis carried out by the ERPI laboratory (Equipe de Recherche sur les Processus Innovatifs) and the CEREFIGE laboratory (Centre Européen de Recherche en Économie Financière et Gestion des Entreprises) at the University of Lorraine. This initial exploratory research has shown that innovation and export have traditionally been considered separately, both within scientific research and within business support institutions. However, linking innovation and export is a major lever for enabling SMEs to project themselves and even develop internationally.