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 without the material support of our two universities (in alphabetical order): the University of Lorraine and the University of Lyon − University Lumière Lyon 2.

In addition, we would like to thank the many scientific and professional experts who have agreed to communicate to us their views on the subject of SMEs and innovation. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to the various companies that shared with us their questions about innovation: these discussions and debates allowed us to review our results and thus discuss them further. The quality of these discussions has led us to focus on the relevance of conceptual developments from the point of view of the people involved, who support SMEs. Through this work, we sincerely hope to honor them, for the courage, endurance and humility they deserve in the face of obstacles, and, for most of them, for the humanism they display towards the many employees who work in SMEs. Finally, we are grateful to our students who inspire and motivate us to work on such projects.

Our final thanks go to our close colleagues, friends and family for their support in our “small business”.

Claudine GAY & Bérangère L. SZOSTAK