Challenges in Commercialisation Processess of Product Innovation among SMEs
Commercialisation presents complex challenges for both large and small and mediumsized firms, particularly those operating in high technology fields. Many activities, resources and external organisations are often needed in order to bring a new product to market in increasingly competitive, dynamic modern business environments, in which the ability to rapidly create and commercialise new products is an important factor that provides several business benefits. It is therefore important to examine the problems that affect the commercialisation process, which was the main objective of this study. The study was conducted following the strategy of case study methodology (cross-cases), where the main purpose was to search for similarities and differences among three case firms in order to acquire a more sophisticated understanding of the challenges affecting commercialization process of product innovation. The results show that the main challenges confronted during the commercialisation process of product innovation can be divided into four main categories: 1) marketing, 2) financing, 3) networking, and 4) business environment. In addition, one of the main contributions of the paper is that it identifies internationalisation as one of the main challenge, which is related to all of the identified challenge categories.