Preliminary analysis showed that 79.5% of Australian SMEs and 75.5% of Thai SMEs
reported using both financial and non financial metrics to measure their innovation
effectiveness. A further 17.7% of Australian respondents and 12.2% of Thai respondents
reported using only financial metrics to measure innovation effectiveness. Results also
indicated that 2.9% of Australian SMEs and 12.2% of Thai SMEs reported using only nonfinancial
metrics. Examination within the Australian sample found that the three most
commonly used metrics were: 1) customer satisfaction (non-financial metric); 2) sales and
sales growth (financial metric); and 3) return on investmenti (financial metric). The three
metrics that were most highly used among the Thai sample were 1) product/service quality
(non-financial metric); 2) sales and sales growth (financial metric); and 3) profit margin
(financial metric).
Although the sample size was limited, Eta squared (2 ), a measure of effect size, from our
study ranges in value from .06-.19 indicating medium to large effect sizes. Cohen (1988)
indicates guidelines for small (0.01), medium (0.06), and large (0.14) effect sizes, suggesting
that this data represents a substantive population.