Shaping Proactivity For Firm Performance: Evaluating The Role Of It-Enabled Collaboration In Small And Medium Enterprises

The emerging importance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), has led to increasing interest in recent years about how to improve their performance. Therefore, to improve SMEs’ performance, we define proactivity as an essential factor that enables a company to anticipate change, to have the desire to make a change, and to create that change in our research framework. We also suppose that Information Technology (IT)-enabled collaboration has the potential to help firms achieve each dimension of proactivity. To verify the research framework, a service platform that was deployed in the Mt. Pillow Leisure Agricultural Area in Yilan County, located in the northeast of Taiwan, is introduced. We argue that SMEs can enhance their performance after they have gained proactivity through cooperation via the service platform. The study is expected to help SMEs improve their performance by realizing the importance of proactivity and the effect of IT-enabled collaboration on proactivity through a validated framework.