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Chapter 4 – Case Studies

4.2 Case Studies

When selecting SMEs as case studies, different SMEs have been selected in order to collect useful and relevant empirical data. The collected empirical data are in the analysis compared with the existing literature on the field of study. This, combined with the literature provided by the three business cases, are used as a foundation for answering the research question on how to create a successful innovation culture in SMEs.

Multiple SMEs have been chosen in order to create a comparative case study. When choosing a comparative case study as a research design, several strategies must be considered in order to provide the best possible outcome from the case studies.

4.2.1 Case Study Strategy

With case studies, different ways of choosing the material needed can be used, and different strategies can be selected. The chosen way and strategy depends on what the researcher wants to investigate and here the following three ways of selecting cases is (Kristensen & Hussain, 2019, p. 51):

• Cause-of-effects

• Effects-of-causes

• Mechanisms and capacities

In search of answering the research question, the case studies in this thesis are selected in order to research on the cause-of-effects. The reason for doing this is that the focus is on finding cases where there is a positive outcome and hereafter search for the effect for that outcome. That positive outcome - in the cases selected - is that the SMEs have been able to grow their turnover continuously over a period of years and the effects are how the SMEs have, by the use of innovation and thereby having a successful innovation culture, been able to create that growth in turnover.

Once the rationale for choosing the cases has been identified, the cases should be selected based on the possibility of giving the best value possible for the research. When dealing with a comparative case study, as this study

37 can be categorized to be, the selection and analysis of cases can be divided into three different categories of cases (Kristensen & Hussain, 2019, p. 52):

• Different cases

• Most similar cases, different outcome

• Most different cases, same outcome

The research design chosen in this thesis is the strategy of most different cases, same outcome, as the research is concerned with the cause of the same outcome in different cases. In this research, the same outcome is represented in the form of continuous growth in the SMEs, and the classification of the cases as different comes in the form of type of business, number of employees and several other factors, which makes the cases different from each other.

The analysis of the comparative case study, where cause-of-effects are chosen as what to research upon and most different cases, same outcome is chosen as the general category of cases for research, will be based on the empirical data collected by the use of qualitative and quantitative methods.

4.2.2 Selecting Cases

The newspaper Børsen is every year presenting so-called gazelle companies.

A gazelle is a company who, in the period of four fiscal years, have had positive growth and as a whole at least has doubled the turnover over the four years (Leisner, 2018). The list of gazelle companies from 2018 presented by Børsen serves as a pool of potential companies for collection of empirical data as these are meeting the criteria of the comparative case strategy being most different cases, same outcome. The gazelle companies fit the classification, as they are different cases, based on the number of employees, structure and field, but they all have the same outcome in the form of growth in turnover. As the method chosen for investigation of the cases is cause-of-effects, the cases are to be analysed for how the effects have caused the success for the companies in the form of growth in turnover and to see if the companies possess an innovation culture, and if so, what the decisive factors are for creating such a culture.

38 The selection of relevant business industry has been affected by the three business cases in section 2.5. Both Google and Apple are in the technology business, and with the move into the digital space, LEGO can partly be argued to be in the technology industry as well. To narrow down the business to select SMEs from, the pool of gazelle companies has been limited to the business industry, which Børsen defines as IKTM – IKT (IT, Telecommunication and Media).

As the research examines how innovation culture successfully can be created in SMEs, the selected companies have further been limited to companies with 10-249 employees as a company with this amount of employees is in Denmark defined as an SME (Jensen et al., 2016). And for the sake of conducting the empirical data, the geographical placement of the companies has been limited to Greater Copenhagen. This geographical segmentation of companies is due to the preferred way of conducting the semi-structured interviews, which is face-to-face. Conducting the interviews face-to-face is done with the hermeneutic methodology in mind, as it is important to understand the particular from the general and vice versa. Transferred to the setting of the conducted interviews, it is therefore important to understand the respondent in regards to the company he or she represents and in the same way, to understand the company culture from the interview with the respondent.

After applying the criteria mentioned, the list was down to 66 companies.

Hereafter a closer review of the companies was conducted by visiting each of the companies’ website. After the review, the list was further shortened down to 22 companies as the excluded companies somehow did not meet the aforementioned criteria, was filed for bankruptcy or contained any other reason causing the company to be of no interest for the later conducted comparative case study. Hereafter the process of contacting the companies began. If possible, the relevant employee was identified from their website and contacted by telephone. If this was not possible, the company was contacted by telephone via their general telephone number. Either it was possible to be provided with a telephone number or email address on a relevant employee - here an employee somehow responsible or included in the innovation process - or the company declined the query to line up for an

39 interview. Hereafter, the list was down to six companies which each had an employee available for an interview. Five of the interviews were conducted via a face-to-face interview, and the last was conducted via a telephone interview. The position for each respondent is presented in Appendix 4. The approximate interview time for each interview was one hour and took place at the respective company with the exception of one of the interviews, which were conducted via telephone. The interviews were conducted in Danish, as this was preferred from all of the respondents.