Innovation adoption and exploitation in SMEs: a systematic literature review

Innovation adoption has been widely debated among scholars in order to identify variables and models that boost adoption processes within firms. Recently, increasing attention has been devoted to understanding effective innovation adoption in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs). Nevertheless, scholars do not seem to have caught all the implications, and only a few papers have addressed the main impediment to innovation adoption, i.e. the ability to capture its benefits, and to enhance the effectiveness of the technology being adopted. Taking this issue, we focus our attention on potential gaps within current knowledge on the adoption of innovation in SMEs. To this purpose, we conduct an extensive literature review on articles and papers dealing with innovation adoption both in large-sized firms and in SMEs, published in the last 23 years, i.e. from 1989 to 2012. We run content and structural analysis on the collected data. Our results contribute to the debate on innovation adoption through systematization of literature and by suggesting a number of research directions that have not been adequately investigated yet. The paper is organized as follows: Section 1 briefly introduces the topic; Section 2 discusses some of the literature on innovation adoption. Section 3 describes the research framework and method applied. Section 4 presents our results. In section 5 we discuss some implications and directions for future research.