Relating innovation with learning capability in Portuguese SME´s

In the contemporary global economy, the survival and competitiveness of the market presses organizations to adopt new organizational formats, as well as new business models. Learning organizations have emerged in this context. These organizations have knowledge management as one of its main features. They use it as a tool for organizational learning, betting in knowledge acquisition as a continuous improvement process. A learning organization is an organization that can incorporate new knowledge and skills in its own structures and processes. This means that a learning organization is also an organization that is continuously increasing its intellectual capital (IC). An increase in IC is generally acknowledged as a cause for an increase of innovation capabilities. So, learning organizations are expected to increase its innovation capabilities either directly or indirectly through IC. The purpose of this paper is to investigate possible relationships between learning capability, innovation capability and intellectual capital increasing in learning organizations. The data used in this paper expresses the perceptions from 60 Portuguese SME´s innovation managers, collected from a sample of SME´s, analysed with multivariate data analysis techniques, as biplots and PLS to estimate structural equations models. Although the results are encouraging, suggesting causal relationships between organizational learning, innovation and intellectual capital, it should not be forgotten that the conclusions are based not in the measurement of physical and economic variables but in opinions and perceptions of specialists that may suffer from eventual biases due to their functions as innovation managers. So, future research in this direction is needed, using observational or experimental data.