Innovation has a profound effect on firm competitiveness, as states the rationale at the beginning of this article. So, in the knowledge society which includes all the organizations, innovation only can arise from using the people’s creative capability. As a consequence, the author deals with the “people’s firm” and with several cultural characteristics of it.

This article presents the results of an exploratory, in-depth research carried out to know about the managerial practices of nine Spanish innovative SME. The purpose of this research was the identification and the assessment of the managerial factors which contribute to technological innovation success.
There is a set of organisational and managerial factors which ought to work together to create and reinforce the kind of environment that enables technological innovation to succeed. The state-of-the-art regarding each of those factors, as well as their application to the firms under scrutiny, are presented in this article.
Two important barriers against innovation were found. On the one hand, a lack of qualified human resources was identified. On the other hand, such lack is not compensated by the establishment of external linkages with the sources of knowledge, such as universities and research centres.

In Bañegil and Sanguino (2003a), we mentioned the steps of the  project  KOGNOPOLIS ©. The KOGNOPOLIS © network included six cities from the regions of Extremadura and the Alentejo and Centre (Almendralejo, Badajoz, Talayuela, Elvas, Évora and Portalegre).
The purpose of this paper is to explain the main conclusions of the research work. The KOGNOPOLIS © network was built aiming to promote Knowledge Management among those institutions belonging to the network; and to carry out the appropiate scientific studies.

The Madrid regional government supports the technology-base firm constitution through the Universities and Research General Directorate, within the madri+d System. From 2000, more that 60 firms have received support in the frame of the Third Scientific Research and Innovation Regional Plan (III PRICIT).