A MULTIDIMENSIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR INNOVATION TYPOLOGY: THE CASE OF MOROCCAN ENTREPRENEURS

Policy makers need a thorough understanding of innovation dynamics within their local contexts to be able to devise the proper strategies for innovation capability building among entrepreneurs. While there is a nascent entrepreneurial ecosystem in Morocco, there is a lack of startup’s innovation research. In this paper we intend to make both a conceptual and empirical contribution. From a theoretical background, innovation, as a concept, is very versatile. With a rich and fragmented corpus of innovation definitions classifications and types, it becomes important to develop a clear and a comprehensive overview of innovation typologies and their underlying dimensions. In this paper, we suggest, through a literature review, a multidimensional approach for the analysis of innovation typologies. Three clusters of dimensions have been identified for the classification of innovations: Innovation Intensity, Innovation Scope, and Innovation Depth. This framework addresses three families of questions: What is its degree of newness? What’s the nature of the innovation? Where does it occur in the ecosystem? From an empirical perspective, this construct has been applied to a panel of 13 Moroccan entrepreneurs to discuss the types of innovations introduced by their startups. The strong interplay between disruptive and incremental innovation, the diversity of innovation scope with a dominance of product and business model innovation, the national emphasis with limited international impact are the main findings of this qualitative study. While there is lack of research on innovation at the enterprise level in Morocco compared with research about ecosystem, this work lays down some foundations for the study of innovation at the enterprise level and constitutes the first step for further research to understand Moroccan startup innovation capability. Ultimately this new stream of research in Moroccan startup innovation field will help entrepreneurs and policy makers in their innovation capability building efforts