Comparative study of organizational innovation and its link with technological innovation in Lower Normandy SMEs

Numerous research works have underlined the existence of diverse kinds of organizational innovations (OI). When small and medium enterprises from the industry sector (SMI's) are taken into account, it is nonetheless difficult to summarize this innovation in one even two organizational changes for a population considered as more heterogeneous than big firms. The complexity of the SMI's thus incites us to retain a great number of indicators of organizational changes in order to account for the diversity of cases. So we assume that the organizational innovation is made up of a range of changes and new practices. Sixteen variables have been retained, gathered into five categories corresponding to the different aspects of organizational changes: training and qualification, knowledge management, production management, quality management, and market transactions. Our first contribution is then to build synthetic and relevant indicators of organizational innovation in the context of SMI's with the aid of multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). Our second contribution is to measure the link between OI indicators with the different types of technological innovation. We then use two regression models of analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) to estimate the link between organizational innovation indicators and technological innovations (product, process and its interaction). The original database exploited is part of the IDEIS2 project and relates to a representative sample of 90 SMEs in Lower Normandy - France. The survey of the project has been realized during the 2009-2010 period and relates to data from the 2006-2008 period. Our synthetic indicators interpret two main dimensions: the Intensity of the implementation of the Organizational Changes (IOC) and the orientation of the Organizational Innovation Strategies (OIS) adopted (more or less based upon the quality of human resources). We find a positive and significant link between IOC and technological innovation and this especially in the case of product innovation. Size influences the IOC positively and significantly. By contrast there is no link between the choice of OIS (more or less based upon quality of human resources) and technological innovation.