The impact of innovation on the performance of industrial SMEs in Morocco

Abstract

For decades, Morocco has been committed to opening up to the international market through free trade agreements, which require national SMEs to improve their competitiveness to face fierce competition. In fact, the innovation factor has become imperative for the development of companies and plays a central role in their performance and survival. Several researchers have focused on innovation that has proven itself in developed countries. However, very few studies have focused on this research field in developing countries such as Morocco. The aim of our study is to verify the relationship between innovation and SME performance. To achieve this, we conducted a field study with 100 Moroccan industrial SMEs using a questionnaire. We adopted a positivist approach. Our approach justifies the hypothetico-deductive reasoning. We used the independence test of (Chi-square) and ANOVA variance to test our research hypotheses. The analysis of the results of our research has shown that there is indeed a close relationship between innovation and the performance of industrial SMEs in Morocco.