Entrepreneurship and innovation process : human resource as competitive advantage for small-sized firms strategy

The object of this paper concerns specific competences development of SME's related to the exploitation and the valorisation of the Human Resource through technological innovation process. Research on entrepreneurial innovation process has developed from observing the profiles of entrepreneurs and their motivations to analysing their strategic vision and behaviour. Our research discusses about managerial practices and core competencies of entrepreneurs both in terms of innovation and human resource management. We have carried out a comparative study of Canadian and French Firms from new and traditional economy. The entrepreneurship is mainly characterised by specific capacities of animation and mobilisation of the human resource. This paper proposes a manifest illustration of this fact in the case of technological innovation process. Any branch of industry meets long punctuated periods of progressive innovation and occasional technological ruptures which call into question technologies in progress in their incremental process. These phenomena were studied with rigour by authors like Utterback (1971) or Burgelman (1983). The innovating company must then be reactive as well in its formal structures as in its competences, the profile of its stations, the careers which it offers, its culture, and more largely in its capacity to cause, support and exploit the innovations. So for a long time, the researchers realise that the innovation must be studied within the framework of its entire process (Zaltman, 1973 ; Rogers, 1983), the solutions considered are primarily from organisational nature (Burns and Stalker, 1961; Normann, 1977) or from strategic nature (Cooper, 1979). However, the innovation is managed by effective men and teams with many competences, precisely able to develop these organisational architectures and these strategies which accompany or influence the innovation. These actors of change are integrated more and more into the center even of the technological innovation problems. One has found, for a few years, many research on the innovation which study the key-role of these actors that one indicates under the term " intraprenors " (Kanter, 1983 ; Pinchot, 1985 ; Burgelman and Sayles, 1987). In the prolongation of these theoretical reflexions, we put here ahead the major role of the human capital mobilisation like a core-competence of the entrepreneur engaged in a technological innovation process. We have conducted a quantitative survey of managerial practices and examined 106 cases of Canadian and French SMEs from new and traditional economy so as to draw to core competencies generative of technological innovation. On the basis of a common questionnaire the entrepreneurs describe their managerial practices, their decision making processes, their strategic options, their long-term vision as well as the necessary competencies of entrepreneurship. This information is then related to their various levels of performance in order to obtain grids of entrepreneurial competencies confirmed by innovation success. Our results show that in SMEs, management styles influence the training. We can observe them in the systems of rewards and sanctions, rotations of station and the plans of career, the work team and the relations of authority. The organizations' human dimension owes to call the researchers and the experts starting from new bases : the management of competencies related to the human capital is indeed from entrepreneurial nature. In fact, the results show that the man places himself in the organizational system main part. Competencies of the individuals are not transparent, and the latter are heterogeneous and require competencies of coordination, integration, mobilisation, communication and animation specific to the contractor carrying projects. At the top of the company, one must find creators and visionaries having in heart to preserve the contact with reality. The leaders must be able to recognize and manage all the intelligence in the case of technological innovation process. The manager engaged in a technological innovation process cannot be satisfied to locate and exploit the regularities; he must also endeavour to analyse the actions in progress, to integrate what they make emerge. That is not simple and implies a deep transformation of mentalities and behaviours. The international aspect of the comparison emphasises the differences between the Canadian and French entrepreneurial systems which require different but complementary recommendations. However, in both cases, human resource is regarded as competitive advantage in the small-sized firms' strategy.