Knowledge implications for the NITEC Program: a preliminary analysis of an innovation program directed at building innovation capabilities in SMEs

Economists and others scientists have demonstrated that RD 2) promotes activities related to RD 3) the people involved are expert in the working and research area; 4) the project-base has a limited period of time (maximum five years); 5) each company has its own project. These features are essential to identify knowledge acquisition in the firms which participated in the program, as a main topic being evaluated in the results. INTRODUCTION Innovation programs are an integral part of the national innovation systems in the form of technological innovation management actions, knowledge management practices and organizational change operations (Lundvall and Borras, 2005; Borras and Fagerberg, 2011). These complex and uncertain processes require specific management, and continuous improvements and investments. Consequently, evaluation tools and methods are required to properly assess these processes and to have a reliable ground on which to make decisions (Papaconstantinou and Polt, 1997; Georghiou and Roessner, 2000; Smith, 2006). However, in some EU countries, such as Portugal, innovation program assessment and measurement is still a relatively novel activity. Moreover, even in regions with a track record in innovation policy, the evaluation of innovation is far from being straightforward (European Commission, 2005). Innovation is a dynamic and constantly evolving system which is adapting itself to a range of internal and external factors (Georghiou, Rigby and Cameron, 2002; Zahra and George, 2000; Borras, Fagerberg and Edquist, 2011). It is difficult to know the inherent elements included in the indirect impacts of innovation, but they exist and cannot be neglected when evaluated. There are feedbacks between policies and other innovation related agents that are difficult to measure. Encouraging innovation can stimulate only the direction and intensity of the results, but generally does not produce by itself impacts initially planned. The indirect impacts are defined as all types of results implicit on the project. Indirect impacts can be related to the same activity generated by the project, provided that they have escaped its initial scope. In this study, only these were considered in the evaluation study of the acquisition of knowledge and transformation processes. Thus, the concept of spillover only refers to the application of new knowledge generated by the project in a different activity in terms of technology or sector, initially unforeseen in the objectives of the project. Evaluating a program that is transformative of knowledge offers the unprecedented opportunity to explore the process of building-up of that process. Describing the context and implementation of a broad set of factors is critical, yet inherently challenging, as is assessing their effectiveness. This paper focuses on three characteristics of evaluation activities: 1) the importance of context; 2) the complexity of the interventions; and 3) the identification of the indirect impacts. Attempts to provide empirical evidence for the existence of such knowledge spanning mechanisms is made in the present study. The goal and the method was to investigate technological learning patterns in terms of knowledge interaction mechanisms through an interview-based exploratory study. The study presented here is structured as follows. The following section describes the innovation programme that was considered in this study. The conceptual framework that guides the interpretation of the case studies is reviewed in section three. Section four develops the hypotheses. Subsequent sections report the results which correspond to a dialogue between ideas and the evidence grounded on the case evaluation. The last section presents the main conclusions, limitations and questions for future research.