Acknowledgements
If you have grown up with an SME, if you have experienced, and sometimes suffered from, the daily life of being a business leader, experienced managerial and financial difficulties, strategic challenges of differentiation in highly competitive sectors, the joys of seeing projects succeed, of winning contracts, of creating jobs for troubled people, or of succeeding in developing their business, writing a book about SMEs is of great personal significance. This meaning is amplified when this in-depth understanding of an SME is enriched by decades of discussions, observations and research with these companies, their managers and employees.
With this knowledge and experience, it was truly satisfying to link them to other scientific expertise: innovation and creativity. And we owe this opportunity to several actors. We would like to thank, first of all, ISTE Ltd and Dimitri Uzunidis for their confidence in the writing of this scientific project. We also wish to thank the Research Network on Innovation (RNI), a network which has fed our thinking, through its important publication activities and the organization of scientific events. Through seminars and large-scale projects, we also think of our current and past research laboratories. They have made it possible to explore some of the ideas in the book, namely (in alphabetical order): BETA (UMR 7522), Coactis (EA 4161) and Triangle (UMR 5206). In addition, we would not have been able to develop the ideas of the book ...