The effect of local and global linkages on the innovativeness in ICT SMEs: does location-specific context matter?

Countries differ significantly with regard to the location-specific contexts in which they are embedded. The aim of this paper is to extend the discussion on the effects of local and global innovation collaborations on the degree of novelty of innovation by considering this context. Our main question is: Does embeddedness in the developed or emerging country context affect the likelihood of benefiting from local or global linkages for innovations with higher novelty? The paper is based on data gathered through a survey of firms in the ICT sector in an emerging economy (India) context and from two Scandinavian countries (Sweden and Norway). The findings of this study show that global linkages do indeed impact the degree of novelty of innovation. However, country context does have a moderating effect. While the effect of global linkages is highly positive on the innovativeness of Scandinavian firms, for the Indian SMEs, the linkages that give novel innovations are the regional ones.