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Developing innovation support services 403
3.3 Firm-level data
The use of innovation support services by small, high-growth T-KIBS firms is an
uncharted research area. In the firm-level analysis, small KIBS firms are understood as
those knowledge-intensive business services that derive their intermediate function
primarily from the production and transfer of technology-related knowledge e.g.,
knowledge related to computer and associated IT services, R&D services or architectural
and technical engineering services (NACE codes 72, 73, and 742/3). The research
data were gathered from interviews with the firms’ CEOs, annual reports and interviews.
The research data were collected from 12 small KIBS firms located in Eastern
Finland. These case firms were selected via purposive sampling (Miles and Huberman,
1984) and the key informants approach was used to collect data from those case firms
that used at least three different kinds of innovation support services during the preceding
two years.
The CEOs of the selected firms were interviewed because they were assumed to
have the best overall knowledge and insight into their respective firms’ use of ISS. In
the firms, the CEOs were also expected to see the implications of specific findings
obtained during the research. Theme-based open questions were asked to explore the
innovation support services used from different, flexible perspectives. In this respect,
previous studies of the innovation support services used by small KIBS firms offered
background information for the questions posed during the interviews. All the
questions were first reviewed by three other academics and were pre-tested by conducting
in-depth pilot-interviews with two managers. Participants were asked to comment on
questions that needed development, and the final list of questions was adjusted
accordingly. Initial contacts with the case firms were made over the telephone.
Participants were interviewed during May and June of 2004 by means of a personally
administered semi-structured theme interview, with a checklist of two groups of
questions regarding:
1 background information and the history of the interviewee and the firm
2 information on the utilisation of innovation support services during the
commercialisation process of innovation, including the type of services used, and the
phase in which they were used.
Interviews lasted, on average, 1½–2 hours. At the start of each interview, the respondents
were asked to base their answers on innovations that they had recently commercialised.
After that, the respondents were requested to give a detailed description of the innovation
support services that they had used. The interviews were digitally recorded and organised
into a usable form. Finally, the data were coded for analysis, by categorising the
innovation support services used into a time-ordered matrix based on the structure of the
commercialisation process in small T-KIBS firms. In addition, annual reports and other
materials (e.g., process-charts) were used to obtain supplementary information.
Descriptions of the interviewees and the firm-related case information are presented in
Appendix 2.