The Web offers a powerful tool for knowledge-sharing among small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Such online initiatives have, however, frequently been unsuccessful. This paper examines factors motivating SMEs to share knowledge online. It reports data from a telephone survey of 192 SME members of two successful regional business networks comprising members from diverse industries. Althoug...

In an assessment of software process improvement (SPI) in 15 software smalland –medium-sized enterprises (software SMEs), we applied the broad spectrum of software specific and system context processes in ISO/IEC 12207 to the task of examining SPI in practice. Using the data collected in the study, we developed a four-tiered pyramidal hierarchy of SPI for software SMEs, with processes in the hi...

This research seeks to explore and detect underlying relationships between identifiable barriers of electronic commerce (ecommerce) adoption in Indonesian small medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). A quantitative pilot study was conducted through a mail survey to collect the relevant data from several cities in three provinces in Indonesia, namely West Java, Bali and DKI Jakarta. The inter-correlat...

The relationship between business strategy and organizational performance has been a subject of growing interest in the field of strategic management. Despite this trend, there has been little attention given to a comparative analysis of this relationship between two different economies. The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the performance differences and business strategy orient...

Two contemporary economic phenomena, namely information and communication technologies (ICTs) and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), have featured in the the discourse on economic development within developing economies. A significant part of these discussions relates to the engagement in e-business activities by SMEs. This paper explores this phenomenon by examining the role of externa...

This study analyzes how small and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs)R&D and foreign direct investment (FDI) affect their technical efficiencies in an environment of globalized production, in order to complement previous researches. Our theoretical proposition suggests that unless the substitution effect dominates the magnification effect, FDI will induce more R&D activities and hence will improve...

Social media has become a major channel for firms’ marketing communications. Yet studies on the impact of social media marketing (SMM) have been limited to a few large firms. Motivated by the lack of understanding of the effectiveness of SMM for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), this study investigates the impact of online SMEs’ SMM messages on their sales performance through customer ...

This paper presents an empirical investigation of the critical determinants for the adoption of e-market in Australian small-and-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) within the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework. A conceptual model is proposed for better understanding the adoption of e-market in Australian SMEs. Structural equation modelling is used for testing and validating the co...

This paper presents a critical analysis of the adoption of e-market in Australian Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) within the technology-organization-environment framework. Through surveying nine hundreds SMEs in Australia and the consequent analysis of the survey data, the paper shows that the level of adoption of e-market in Australian SMEs is still low with the dominant trend of ado...

20 AbstrAct. In this paper we outline the status quo of ethics and social responsibility in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the European Union (EU). Social issues and SMEs is an established topic of research and subject of policy-making in Europe, and thus in this paper we are able to draw on existing activities to summarise what we know about the topic. We describe the important p...