Innovativeness in food small business : what is its relationship with marketing?

Small businesses often do not have a sufficient capacity to put the appropriate R&D activities into action. Nevertheless, they are able to be innovative towards their products, processes, distribution channels, and geographical markets. Therefore, even for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the level of innovativeness can be high. The literature shows that the firm marketing capabilities are very important for innovation in the food industry, to guarantee that innovation reflects the market needs. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the level of firm innovativeness and different steps of the marketing management process, to understand if good marketing capabilities can affect the firm innovativeness. An interactive questionnaire available on the web was used for the data collection. The survey was conducted on 468 European SMEs. Linear Regression was run to assess the link between marketing activities and the level of firm innovativeness. Our empirical analysis reveals that the SME marketing capabilities show significant and positive relationships with firm innovativeness.