Dear Colleagues,

Startups operate in highly competitive and fluctuating markets, and continuous innovation is key to their survival. Continuous innovation can take various forms, such as through business model innovation. This requires startups to be highly responsive to opportunities in the marketplace. These opportunities could spur radical or incremental innovations. This ability to foster innovation comes from the dynamic capabilities of the startup. This Special Issue aims to disseminate research that highlights how startups could continuously innovate in fluctuating markets and, most importantly, how they continuously build their dynamic capabilities. The focus is to highlight the research from an engineering perspective with observed business impacts (business perspective). The innovation requires startups to generate ideas, test these ideas, and finally commercialise them. The innovations in startups are executed through continuous experimentations where hypotheses related to ideas, products, technologies, market selections, or any business processes are validated before they are executed in reality. The continuous experimentation is thus based on rigorous mathematical models. This Special Issue will disseminate innovation-related research pertaining to Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) supported by rigorous mathematical models.

This Special Issue disseminates the extended version of accepted and presented papers in the “International Conference on Innovation Management in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises: Practice, Strategies, and Impacts (IMSMEs-2023)”, Potsdam, Germany. The International conference is organized by the Multidisciplinary Research Center for Innovations in SMEs (MRCiS), GISMA University of Applied Sciences, Potsdam, Germany, in collaboration with INSERAS Research Group, Universidad de Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), Spain, on 24–25 August 2023. The conference will be at GISMA University of Applied Sciences, Think Campus, Konrad-Zuse-Ring 11, 14469 Potsdam, Germany. More information about the conference can be accessed at https://bit.ly/3NmgK1N.  

The SI also invites other researchers who cannot take part in the conference to submit their research papers falling within the SI’s scope.  

Dr. Varun Gupta
Prof. Dr. Chetna Gupta
Prof. Dr. Antonio Ferreras
Dr. Leandro Ferreira Pereira
Dr. Lawrence Peters
Guest Editors

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