The major objective of SME innovations was enhancement of competitiveness in the
form of quality improvement, cost reduction, extension of product range and replacement
of phased out products, apart from penetrating the international market. Accordingly,
they have primarily focused on both product and process innovations in the auto and
electronics sectors and process innovations in the machine tool sector. What is significant
is that a substantial majority of the innovative SMEs could convert their innovative
efforts into sales as they realized varying proportions of innovated products in their total
sales. This has enabled the majority of them to achieve sales growth more than anything
else. However, hardly anybody could obtain international patents and the recognitions are
largely confined to winning of awards from large enterprise customers and financial
institutions.