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Philipp Walter Sauter
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Last Name
Sauter
First name
Philipp Walter
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+41 71 224 7227
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PublicationCoordination Mechanisms for International Innovation in SMEs: Effects on Time-To-Market and R&D Task Complexity as a Moderator(Springer Science & Business Media, 2016)As SMEs increasingly internationalize their innovation activities, our study strives to improve our understanding of the coordination mechanisms that SMEs can adopt to orchestrate these activities. Building on the evolutionary theory of organizations, we link three established coordination mechanisms (centralization, formalization, and socialization) to the time-to-market of SMEs' product innovations. We also argue that the complexity of the internationalized R&D tasks moderates the relationship between the three coordination mechanisms and time-to-market. Survey data from 103 SMEs with international innovation activities broadly support our theoretical account. With respect to the main effects, our findings suggest that a high degree of centralization tends to prolong the time-to-market, whereas formalization tends to shorten it. The moderation results further indicate that centralization can become more beneficial when a firm internationalizes highly complex R&D tasks, while formalization tends to become less beneficial with increasing task complexity. Main and moderation effects with respect to socialization are inconclusive. We discuss the implications of these findings for the academic literature and management practice.Type: journal articleJournal: Small Business EconomicsVolume: 46Issue: 2
Scopus© Citations 34 -
PublicationHow highly exporting SMEs set-up their R&D activities : Examples from the Swiss Machine Building IndustryIn this paper, we investigate how highly exporting small- to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) set up their R&D activities to be competitive in a global economy. As companies with limited resources vis-à-vis their larger counterparts, SMEs as niche players often have to expand their markets and simultaneously have to remain technology leader within their industry. We identify two main organizational approaches that SMEs apply: captive offshore R&D activities and technology cooperations. In our research based on 31 interviews with R&D managers and four in-depth case studies, we derive four distinct archetypes: ‘domestic integrator', ‘world-wide integrator', ‘domestic specialist' and ‘world-wide specialist'. These archetypes are illustrated and discussed along four cases. Our findings reveal that each archetype necessitates a very specific set of strategic, organizational and operational characteristics to attain a coherent set-up of their R&D activities. This paper is designed to support R&D managers of highly exporting SMEs on how R&D activities can be organized and which contextual factors should be taken into account.Type: conference paper
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PublicationWenn neue Standorte die alten überflügeln : Ein Rasterkonzept für den Aufbau und die Führung globaler Forschungs- und Entwicklungsaktivitäten(Handelszeitung Fachverlag AG, 2011-05-27)
;Maisch, Rolf. P. ;Widenmayer, BastianType: newspaper articleJournal: io managementVolume: 2011Issue: 6