The influence of entrepreneurial creativity, work experiences, customer´s and competitor´s information, and scientific information on product and process innovations

This study developed and tested a model of the influence of entrepreneurial creativity, work experiences, customer and competitor´s information, and scientific information on product and process innovations. The model was tested on 497 usable responses from mail survey data from a sample of small manufacturing Slovenian firms. The structural relationships in the model were estimated using the EQS multivariate software. The results revealed that product and process innovations are both influenced by customer´s and competitor´s information, scientific information and entrepreneurial creativity (all statistically significant at 5% level). Although, work experiences were found to be less important, the influence of work experience on product and process innovations was statistically significant at 10% level. While the product innovations variance explained was 43%, the process innovations variance explained was 27%.