Systematic innovation practices for SMEs

Innovation is the main goal for small and medium enterprises as well as for big companies; nevertheless, while the latter are used to the introduction of new methodologies and tools for increasing the competitive potential of their product development cycle, SMEs usually give a greater relevance to personal talent and expertise of few employees. Moreover they have to face a continuous lack of resources, so that an investment on high level education is often prohibitive.Nevertheless small companies have the opportunity to play an even more relevant role for the economy of EU due to their greater flexibility and potential capability to adapt to market needs more easily.Therefore a customized approach must be adopted for providing innovation means to SMEs. According to this perspective, the authors are experiencing a 360 degrees cooperation with several small companies in order to develop a comprehensive roadmap. This paper first analyzes basic constraints of the SMEs world and some relevant differences with bigger companies; then the integrated approach for enhancing innovation capabilities is presented together with the main actions already accomplished.The authors in the past have collected several successful experiences about innovation and problem solving tasks working with different medium/large size companies, by integrating TRIZ theory and tools with PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) systems. On the base of the positive feedbacks gained through those collaborations, a special program has been started aimed at introducing systematic innovation practices even in SMEs.This paper describes the guidelines defined so far to achieve such a goal, supported by three concurrent pillars: monitoring, support, education. In order to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach two case studies are presented: the redesign of a hinge for household appliances and the re-engineering of the production for an industrial mixer.