Profiling exporting SMEs: The role of innovation-orientation

Abstract

Existing evidence suggest that SME exporting is affected by a combination of environmental, firm-level, and owner-level drivers. However, it is not yet clear what constitute the profile of exporting SMEs and whether innovation orientation plays a role. To fill this important gap, our study adopts a configurational approach contending that a specific set of drivers makeup the profiles of exporting SMEs. Using the Classification and Regression Trees (CART) algorithm, we empirically show three distinctive exporting profiles for product, service, and process innovators, with varying magnitude and importance of export drivers. Our results show the most important export drivers for product, service and process innovators. While process innovators’ profile excludes process innovation, product and service innovators’ profiles include product and service innovation respectively. These results lead to major policy and managerial implications in relation to promoting exporting among SMEs given that the UK has left the European Union.