The empirical literature relates increasingly competitive environments to innovative business activities. The chapter aims at analyzing proactivity as a condition of the dynamics to which organizations are obliged to search for, devise, and generate an adequate response, accompanied by the capacity for innovation and sustainability in the nature of the response to achieve a competitive advantage. This chapter contributes to the understanding of small business innovation capacity. It proposes a model that starts from the market orientation and the social orientation, as variables that enhance the innovation capacity of the companies, impelling in this way, their response to the needs of the customers. A multi-case study is used to validate the said model in the SMEs rural in Cáceres. The results show a reactive market orientation and a high awareness of generating sustainability conditions. This means that environmental and social orientation should be maintained or adapted to so innovation can be sustainable in the long run.
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At present, having satisfied customers is not enough, this has led companies of different sizes, especially small and medium-sized companies, to develop a mechanism to obtain, generate customer information, markets and competition to support the development of strategies and innovative activities that enable them to respond quickly to the competitive environment. According to (Song et al., 2009) innovation is an important source of competitive advantage. Therefore, for innovation to succeed, it is necessary to instill a culture of constant search for opportunities that impacts the quality of innovation. Successful innovation, understood as a positive exit from the innovation process, is the primary means by which firms maintain and expand their product and customer markets (Baker and Sinkula 2005). This panorama implies the need to pay special attention to a high management to the achievement of the superior performance objectives in the companies.
Vasconcello (2013) corroborates with the approach of the previous authors and adds that the innovation will allow a strategic positioning that will allow the maintenance and / or increase of the business performance. In this same line of thought, Han et al., 1998; Hult et al., 2004, affirm that a large number of studies suggest that the market orientation is positively associated with a superior performance, for example: number of innovations adopted.
Hooley et al. (2005) reinforces the above, considering that the increase in market orientation implies the development of customer relationships and the ability to develop and launch new goods and services.
However, there is still no consensus on the role of market orientation in the success of innovation. For example, some researchers propose that a market-oriented firm may diminish its ability to innovate if it only listens to consumers' voice (Christensen and Bower 1996, Lukas and Ferrell 2000 and Widiana M. E. 2017).
In the light of the above, the lack of consensus on the role of market orientation in innovation, the aim of this exploratory work is to contribute to the improvement of knowledge about involvement, and the proactive market in the development of the innovation process in SMEs “caceres”.