The effect of public support on senior manager attitudes to innovation

Senior manager innovation-orientated attitudes are key drivers of innovation within micro and smaller firms. Despite this, little guidance exists on the initiatives organisations can utilise to induce and strengthen such desirable attitudes. In this paper, we investigate whether innovation vouchers, an increasingly prevalent form of public innovation support that funds short-term collaborative projects to solve innovation problems for micro and smaller firms, influence senior manager innovation-orientated attitudes. We use a treatment effects approach to examine our question, specifically, propensity score nearest neighbour matching on a U.K. dataset of firms that received an innovation voucher between 2012 and 2015, and a control group of those that did not. Overall, we find that innovation vouchers induce small positive changes in senior manager innovation-orientated attitudes, with the largest change observed for senior manager openness to external knowledge, followed by risk tolerance. Overall, we show innovation vouchers strengthen senior manager innovation-orientated attitudes, thus advancing insights into the determinants of innovation-orientated attitudes and the additionality effects of public support programmes. We discuss implications for innovation policy and practice