This article studies the innovation management of 105 creative SMEs in Flanders and the Netherlands. This region appears to have an innovative climate and stimulating life style, well developed infrastructure and proximity of logistics and suppliers. However, we identified many restricting legislations and regulations that hamper creative SMEs. Above that, creative SMEs fail to find sufficient access to capital to invest in their growing innovative activities. Dutch creative SMEs find more easily access to external financial resources and governmental support than their Flemish colleagues. Finally, the use of managerial and financial tools seems uncommon but required among creative SMEs.
IT-based networking trends such as the rise of social media, crowd sourcing, open innovation, and cloud computing enable a profoundly different way of working and collaborating that challenges significantly traditional approaches of companies towards governance, i.e. the mechanisms a company employs to achieving business results and safeguarding information. Standard practices developed with a hierarchical model of the company in mind, are inadequate for providing sufficient correlation between governance mechanisms deployed and results achieved. Popular literature on the subject states that dealing effectively with such new technologies in a business environment requires relinquishing control and subverting to trust. This paper makes the case that deploying successfully new IT-based networking tools rather involves shifting one’s trust from a well-established and well-known governance system based on hierarchy and control towards another governance system, termed in the literature as network governance. This paper assesses when network governance is the better suited governance system. The presented theoretical model helps to understand how companies should use arising new technologies and which tasks are suited for network-driven IT-applications. Furthermore, the model enables to understand how network governance works to achieve business results and to safeguard information exchanges.
SMEs represent a very important part of the European economy today, and within this SME group the creative sector is recently one of the fastest growing sectors. Our paper studies the innovation management of 105 creative SMEs in Flanders and the Netherlands, based on the innovation diagnostic instrument, developed by Mazzarol & Reboud (2006). On the side of the „innovation climate‟ we identified many stimulating factors such as the well developed infrastructure and proximity of logistics and suppliers and an innovative and stimulating life style in the global area of Flanders and the Netherlands. However, we identified many restricting legislations and regulations that seem to hamper seriously most creative SMEs. Above that, many creative SMEs fail to find sufficient access to capital to invest in their growing innovative activities. We observe that the Dutch creative SMEs find more easily access to external financial resources and governmental support and subventions than their Flemish colleagues. Finally, the use of managerial tools like a SWOT analysis or setting up a solid financial or business plan seems very uncommon but required among creative SMEs.
