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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the market orientation and the marketing management capabilities of SMEs that produce traditional food products, by identifying their critical points in marketing activities.

The theoretical framework of this analysis relates to market orientation approach. Marketing management capability was evaluated through a questionnaire using proxies to study the different stages of marketing management. The survey involved 150 firms of which 118 are SMEs producing traditional food products, located in Hungary, Belgium, and Italy. The data were collected by a self‐administered internet survey and were analysed using multivariate analyses.

Cluster analysis resulted in four clusters with different marketing management capabilities. Most of the SMEs in the sample lack marketing management capabilities, even if a considerable proportion of the firms considered report good marketing capabilities that lead to a market orientation. The weakest step of market orientation is the dissemination of generated intelligence. Indeed, SMEs lack marketing organisational activities, namely in planning and implementation of marketing strategy. Moreover, SMEs with better performance check that their objectives are reached but do not compare their strategy with that of competitors. Hence, they could miss opportunities to keep up to date with market development.

This paper provides interesting insights about the marketing capabilities of food SMEs, which usually find it difficult to stay in the market beside large firms. Moreover, there are not many contributions in the literature about the application of market orientation approach on traditional food producers.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, it aims to investigate how internal and external drivers affect innovation in the Italian food industry. Second, the authors are interested to understand to what extent these drivers are industry specific, and therefore, they are contrasted against those relevant for the pharmaceutical industry in Italy according to the increasing growth of cross-industry innovation between these two sectors. The paper aims, thus, to shed light on the differences between food and pharmaceutical industries in terms of innovation drivers to understand potential precursors of emerging industry convergence.

Both probit and bivariate probit models are estimated, using data from the Italian Community Innovation Survey, in order to provide empirical evidence on drivers affecting innovation in the food and pharmaceutical industries.

The innovation activity of Italian food and pharmaceutical companies strongly relies on the presence of in-house R & D activities. Whereas firms in the pharmaceutical industry combine both internal and external R & D activities and knowledge sources to produce innovation, the case of the food industry is strongly dependent on the acquisition of external technology. In particular, the increased need for absorptive capacity of both sectors emphasises the key role of university research for collaboration, knowledge transfer and product innovation.

The paper gives insights not only on drivers for innovation, but especially on the industry-specific differences which should be taken into account to have a contingent view. Limitations concern the impossibility to perform panel data analysis, due to the design of the database. Furthermore, both food and pharmaceutical sub-samples are not completely representative, since large companies tend to be overrepresented.

This paper provides managerial insights concerning the internal and external drivers affecting innovation. Moreover, it raises awareness as regards the possible differences between the food and pharmaceutical industries, which is crucial for establishing successful pathways for cross-industry innovation.

This study represents one of the few attempts to compare the innovation drivers of two manufacturing sectors (food and pharmaceutical), increasingly involved in cross-industry collaborations, and to highlight the industry-specific differences in those drivers which can act as forerunners of this phenomenon.