Standards behaviours face to innovation of the entrepreneurships of Beira Interior

an to what extent small firms have a capacity to trigger and sustain endogenous
development in less favoured areas (Nicolas and Noronha, 2000, p.1).

In the area of regional economy the influence of economic geography has enlarged the
debate, introducing new concepts like “territory, local development, milieu innovateur”,
and regional/local innovation systems. Theorists of development issues like Bramanti
(1999) Bramanti and al. (2000), Camagni (1999) (eds.2000), Maillat and Kebir (1999),
etc., use a few theoretical approaches incorporating the territorial and spatial socio-
economic constraints from which a set of conditions for local endogenous development
could be suggest. In this context, many of these descriptions refer to small companies as
determinant actors in the process for regional dynamism, but only when the economic
territories generate an environment context, inputs from agents have a synergetic effect.

The competitive performance of the regions is associated with strong innovation
dynamics. But innovation as a concept and as an application has suffered deep
alterations. The innovation concept has come to encompass not only the perspective of
Schumpeter (1934), that innovation exists when new elements are introduced (radical
innovation), but also the adaptation, modification and improvement of products,
processes or services (incremental innovation).

Moreover, in the last decades the idea that innovation results from a process in chain
with origins in applied investigation, with well delimited sequences and of automatic
chaining has been rejected. Effectively, the linear model was abandoned. Today
consensus is verified in the studies of Dosi (1988), Dosi et al (1988) Cheap (1992),
Edquist (1997), Guinet (1999), Orange (1999), Simôes (1999), Lopes (2001), Conceiçâo
and Avila (2001) and Lundvall (1992), among others, that innovation results from a
system of feedbacks, forward or backward linkages, between different functions and
different actors in a network of cooperation .

Also, Landabaso (1997) analyse the innovation process at regional level and consider it
when a systemic phenomena based in the accumulation of learning processes results of
cooperation networks that encourage the interaction between the different actors.
Effectively, a emphasis has been put on the analyses of local development in the

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