The adoption of Internet technologies by the small business sector is important to their ongoing survival. Yet, given the opportunities and benefits that Internet technologies can provide it has been shown that Australian small businesses are relatively slow in adopting them. This paper develops a model from recent literature on the facilitators and inhibitors to the adoption of Internet techno...

The current trend in antipoverty policy emphasizes mandated empowerment: the poor are being handed the responsibility for making things better for themselves, largely without being asked whether this is what they want. Beneficiary control is now being built into public service delivery, while microcredit and small business promotion are seen as better ways to help the poor. The clear presumptio...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how small businesses may deploy a formalised Stage-Gate approach to new product development (NPD). The original Stage-Gate framework was modified to better suit a small business B2B environment in the seafood industry, and was subsequently applied to a small vertically-integrated crab catching, processing and marketing business. Design/metho...

In recognition of the limitations of more traditional methods such as surveys and quantitative techniques, small business researchers are making increasing use of qualitative methods. This paper reports on a relatively novel qualitative method in small business research the use of longitudinal focus groups, conducted twice a year in 5 locations around England, as a means of tracking the experie...

This paper empirically examines some environmental scanning practices of high, medium and low growth Australian manufacturing SMEs. Building on McMahon’s (2001) work, the study applies scanning related variables from Australia’s Business Longitudinal Survey to the three growth paths identified. The study finds significant differences between the scanning practices of SMEs from each of the growt...