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Much of the existing literature on innovation intermediaries is focused on manufacturing, and limited scientific knowledge has been developed about the role of intermediaries in services. This paper aims to expand and test an existing framework on the roles and functions of intermediaries in services, focusing specifically on consultancies. Furthermore, it is investigated to what extent services and manufacturing are perceived as different clients, and what represents the added-value of consultancies. Using a case study approach, consultancies´ activities are analysed and compared within services and manufacturing contexts. Findings indicate that while consultancies do not consider manufacturing companies different from service companies, during the collaboration process several differences do exist in terms of their role in these two types of companies, mainly due to different degrees of development of the corresponding innovation strategies and to different perspectives regarding the use of technology.

High-potential new ventures are a source of economic growth, which policy makers call upon in times of crisis when entrepreneurship is seen as a remedy to economic downturn. Yet at these times new ventures face intensified selection, and survival hinges on heterogeneous capabilities. We examine how the innovative capabilities of new firms created in the Netherlands in 2001-2006, affected their survival likelihood before, during and after the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. We estimate a piecewise exponential model linking survival times, observed in the time period from 2001 to 2015, to longitudinal innovation data from the CIS. Our results show that new ventures innovating within two years from founding benefit of a long-term adaptive survival premium during and after the crisis. This premium and its duration over the stages of the crisis are contingent to the form of innovation: technological innovations entail a more effective and enduring premium, as compared to managerial innovations, which can be even detrimental for survival. Our study has implications for entrepreneurial management, by highlighting how the development of innovative capabilities at founding, lays the foundations for organisational adaptation and resilience in the longer term. Furthermore, our results can inform a policy approach that aims at sheltering from the storm of a financial crisis, those new ventures that do possess the specific and necessary adaptive capabilities, but that are also vulnerable because of the liabilities of newness and smallness. Such an approach could help to maintain alive the process of entrepreneurial experimentation during the crisis, and to boost economic recovery, without dispersing precious resources.

In this paper, we join the debate on business innovation modes that originates from the wider literature on innovation systems. These specific contributions identify and study the impact of different innovation modes, particularly the mode focused on scientific and technologically-based innovation (STI) vs. the mode based on learning-by-doing, by-using, and by-interacting (DUI). Echoing the seminal contribution by Jensen et al. (2007) and a range of other studies, we confirm the importance of the combined STI&DUI interaction mode, which has a stronger impact on innovation output (technological and non-technological) than the two separate individual modes. Additionally, we propose a novel hypothesis on the effectiveness of firm's interaction modes. We argue that the independent STI mode has a stronger effect on technological innovation, whereas the independent DUI mode has a stronger impact on non-technological innovation. In addition, in line with works on the geography of innovation, and innovation systems, we try to determine the impact of regional vs. global DUI and STI interactions on technological and non-technological innovations. In this case, we expect that in diverse geographic locations, businesses tend to adopt their own context-specific interaction modes, which produce a differentiated impact on innovation output. This study is applied to a large sample of firms in the context of the Basque Autonomous Community in Spain.

Complementarities between technological and non-technological innovation are crucial determinants of firm performance. Although innovation complementarity has been extensively tested in the empirical literature, it has not been analysed in conjunction with innovation persistence. This fact is mainly due to the lack of data sets able to provide adequate longitudinal information. The capacities to develop market-oriented behaviour and introduce new organisational innovations, together with technological innovation, are the drivers of a firm’s productivity and profitability. We find that these activities complement technological innovation and that their impact is greater when they persist over time, thus introducing a more general concept of innovation persistence. We present an empirical model based on a large new panel of Italian manufacturing firms covering the period 2000–2012 which enables us to determine the precise impacts of a firm’s innovative attitude, in a broad definition that incorporat...