This study surveys the perceptions and experiences of Australian smalland medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the adoption of Internet-based Electronic Commerce (EC). This paper proposes a framework of EC adoption for SMEs. With a sample of 115 small businesses in Australia, preliminary results show that respondents’ perception of Internet-based EC are pre-dominantly positive. However, a further...

It is widely recognized that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are some of the core elements involved in increasing levels of employment in most economies, and that these companies can also play a relevant role in the development of new sources of innovation and the creation of competitive advantages in new productive activities or service areas. Only through the strengthening of SMEs c...

While extant business intelligence systems (BIS) adoption research focused mainly on adoption of BIS in large-sized organizations, our understanding about the adoption determinants and the process within small and medium enterprises (SME) is still limited. The aim of our research is to identify SME-specific determinants of BIS adoption at firm level that will guide the development and testing o...

This paper describes a framework for the analysis and strategic management of online infrastructures of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) based on the concepts of business networks and virtual organisation. The framework forms part of an ongoing research on small firms in the electronic business sector in Australia. Given the virtual features of the online economy, the virtual organisat...

Key conclusions • The emphasis on management accounting in SMEs tends to be on control information rather than aiding decision-making; there is a tendency to make decisions without adequate, or indeed any, financial information or analysis; • In smaller enterprises, the management accounting is often undertaken by the owner-manager/entrepreneur, resulting in significant opportunity costs. Where...

Article history: Received 20 October 2011 Received in revised form 11 July 2012 Accepted 12 July 2012 Available online 20 July 2012 In this paper we analyze the relationship between survival, employment growth and firm size in Chile, an economy that has reduced largely its trade barriers in the last three decades. We are particularly interested in analyzing whether the small and medium sized en...

This paper introduces the VPS-Benchmark – a maturity model for performance evaluation and improvement in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with a special focus on virtual engineering. By giving a brief overview on existing approaches for performance evaluation and improvement we point out the demand for a new maturity approach specialized on the requirements of SMEs. The new maturity mo...

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 tha...

How and when do smalland medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) benefit most from idea generation activities? The answer is perhaps not as straightforward as one might assume. SMEs are subject to size-related liabilities, which often obstruct their efforts in successfully undertaking front-end activities. The front-end period begins when an idea is recognized collectively in the firm as representing a...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) make a significant contribution to national economies. They have distinct characteristics and challenges which need to be addressed differently compared to large organisations. These characteristics may lead SMEs to different practices in many areas of business. Knowledge management (KM) is one of these areas in which SMEs’ practices could be different ...