ABSTRACT Small and medium enterprise (SME) open innovation has received attention only for new product development, overlooking the fact that process innovation is a strategy commonly pursued by SMEs which requires organizing search strategies or external knowledge sourcing for that purpose. Focusing on 3,348 process-oriented innovative SMEs, defined as those that usually and primarily only introduce process rather than product innovation, this study empirically identifies key external sources of SME innovation for process technologies, linking open innovation to SME performance, and highlighting a very important distinction to literature focused on product development. The results contribute to the literature on SME open innovation.

中文翻译：

---

中小企业为流程开发进行开放式创新：了解流程专用的外部知识源

摘要中小企业（SME）的开放式创新仅在新产品开发方面受到关注，而忽略了流程创新是SME普遍追求的战略这一事实，为此需要组织搜索策略或外部知识采购。该研究针对3,348个面向流程的创新型中小企业（定义为通常且主要仅引入流程而非产品创新的中小企业），从经验上确定了流程技术的SME创新的关键外部来源，将开放式创新与SME绩效联系起来，并强调了一个非常重要的与文献的区别集中在产品开发上。研究结果有助于有关中小企业开放创新的文献研究。