Innovation Openness in SupplySide Relationships: Analysis of SME Cases

This research focuses on supply chain performance measurement systems (SCPMSs) and its purpose is to offer the most appropriate managerial practices that can help innovative firms that want to improve their performance in dynamic competitive contexts, reconfiguring internal products/processes and repositioning their supply in modern, innovative, and recently-established international production chains, which moreover are very different from the supply chains to which they belong. This is ongoing research, and, in this paper, it is intended to present the first cognitive results, still being studied and evaluated. The research focuses on a sample of 20 study cases, and its aim is to detect if small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) that innovate efficiently benefit from enhanced competitiveness. As far as the methodology adopted is concerned, the qualitative analysis of the cases was carried out with an inductive method.