Open to Innovation: An approach to European small and micro scale food enterprise development

This text offers key insights, strategies, and tools to foster, promote, and integrate innovative improvements within small food firms. The book presents a characterization of the micro and small SME sector in Europe and emerging best practice in the area of food producing SME support including collaboration, knowledge exchange, technology transfer, entrepreneurship, and communication. The innovation strategy presented is underpinned by an experiential evidence base drawn from 3 years of SME support activities delivered to a European network of small food firms via the TRADEIT project and EU funded SME Support and development initiative. This book will instruct and engage practitioners in designing action plans to empower SMEs to innovate, source, integrate, and apply new knowledge, technologies, and partnerships. Open to Innovation: An approach to small and micro scale food enterprise development addresses innovation in small and micro scale SMEs by providing an actionable framework and insights on how to collaborate with the firms to identify appropriate improvement opportunities in line with absorptive capacities which will increase the intensity of knowledge transfer, resulting in improvements in innovation engagement, processing standards, operational, and management practices through developing skills, insights, and professional networks.