significantly correlated with connectivity to global knowledge (as reflected by use of internet, and also export participation and use of consulting services for the SLLSE data) and access to skills (as reflected by use of training, namely whether the firm trains its workers in the case of the WBES, and by the highest level of education that the entrepreneur has completed and whether the entrepreneur has taken part in training to improve business skills in the case of the SLLSE). In the 2011 WBES, use of internet and whether the firm trains workers are both statistically significant (at the 1% level) and positively associated with all four available measures of innovation; the average education level of employees is statistically significant (at the 1% level) and positively associated with process innovation (the introduction of new or significantly improved methods of manufacturing products or offering services). In the 2009 SLLSE, whether the firm used a consulting service is statistically significant (at the 1% level) and positively associated with four of the five measures of innovation, while internet use is statistically significant and positively associated with introducing new products or services, and with organizational innovation; the highest level of education completed is significantly associated with three measures of innovation, while training to improve business skills is associated with two measures. Access to finance, on the other hand, is not significantly associated with any of the four measures of innovation in the 2011 WBES data, and only significantly (at the 1% level) associated with two of the five measures of innovation (organizational and marketing innovation) in the SLLSE data. What is most striking in these findings is the similar patterns of association across two very different datasets sampled in two different years (in 2010 and 2008, respectively).

We also explore how different types of training are associated with innovation. In addition to whether or not managers received business training, the SLLSE collected information on the type of organization providing the training. In Table 12, we replace our measure of whether the manager has received any training with discrete indicators for five different _types_ of training: (1) secondary or technical school, (2) college or university, (3) courses offered by the government or NGOs, (4) courses offered by consulting firms, and (5) paid individual consultancies. The results in Table 11 suggest that individual consultancies and courses offered by consulting firms are the only types of training that are statistically significantly correlated with different measures of innovation. We find a positive relationship between individual consultancy and process, organizational and marketing innovations. We also find evidence that courses offered by consultancies are positively correlated with process innovations. While our evidence is certainly not conclusive, our results suggest that private-sector based training has a stronger link with different types of innovation than public sector or NGO-based training. Our findings on the statistically significant correlations between innovation and connectivity to global knowledge are robust to the inclusion of these different types of training.

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