Governments are increasingly focusing their efforts on stimulating innovation within small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As a result, university-industry-government collaboration is gaining importance among the agenda of policymakers to enable open innovation in SMEs. However, these inter-organisational relationships often fail to meet expectations, especially when projects are oriented to pre-competitive R&D. Nevertheless, the literature has not yet provided sufficient evidence of the challenges related to the participation of traditional SMEs (i.e., low- and medium-low tech SMEs) in this specific type of collaboration. We collected qualitative data to analyse longitudinally three pre-competitive projects, exploring the main challenges faced by traditional SMEs. We have bracketed the projects in four phases: initiation and planning phase, execution phase, closing phase, and monitoring and control phase. For each of these phases we have individuated firm- and project-level challenges, providing practical and theoretical insights for open innovation scholars.

各国政府越来越将精力集中在刺激中小企业创新上。结果，大学-工业界-政府间的合作在决策者的议程中变得越来越重要，以实现中小企业的开放式创新。但是，这些组织间的关系通常无法满足期望，尤其是在项目针对竞争前的研发的情况下。然而，文献尚未提供足够的证据来证明与传统中小型企业（即中低技术中小型企业）参与这种特定类型的合作有关的挑战。我们收集了定性数据，以纵向分析三个竞争前项目，从而探索了传统中小企业面临的主要挑战。我们将项目分为四个阶段：启动和计划阶段，执行阶段，结束阶段以及监视和控制阶段。对于每个阶段，我们都针对公司和项目层面的挑战，为开放式创新学者提供了实用和理论上的见解。