A main inhibitor to electronically extending supply chains is that large organizations and the majority of their smaller business partners have incompatible business systems. Big businesses’ sophisticated IT infrastructures support many kinds of information integration, manipulation, and reporting, whereas many small to medium businesses (SMBs) use IT only for simple clerical tasks. Big busines...

The objective of this research is to contribute to the understanding of the impact of culture on the adoption and use of IT by Very Small Businesses (VSB). For this, we propose to develop a conceptual framework adapted to very small businesses. Very small businesses being more of an individual issue than organizational, the analytical framework opts for an individual approach of the phenomenon,...

The marketing concept maintains that the starting point for good marketing, whether it be for a service or a product, is to understand the situation from the perspective of the customer. To appreciate the customer’s view of your business and your market offering, you need to appreciate several factors. First, many of your customers or potential customers view anything offered by a business with...

In this paper, an overview is provided of computer security threats faced by small businesses. Having identified the threats, the implications for small business owners are described, along with countermeasures that can be adopted to prevent incidents from occurring. The results of the Australian Business Assessment of Computer User Security (ABACUS) survey, commissioned by the Australian Insti...

In this study, the relationship between environmental innovation and sustainability is analyzed in 168 handicraft businesses in the Mexican states of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Tlaxcala. The results show a direct, positive relationship between environmental innovation and sustainability in three dimensions: economic, social, and environmental. In terms of determination, the variables that best explain...

While electronic data interchange (EDI) has been discussed in the literature as a technology that can provide several advantages, both strategic and operational, to its adopters, the adoption rate, especially that of small businesses, has not been as high as predicted. The question is why? Based on data collected from more than four hundred and sixty non-EDI adopters, our results suggest that t...

What is the magnitude of credit constraint or credit gap affecting small businesses? This paper provides estimates of credit gap, defined as the difference between the desired and actual levels of debt for credit-constrained small businesses using the data from the National Survey of Small Business Finances. The estimated credit gap is approximately 20 percent – credit constrained small busines...

The paper investigates whether monetary restrictions— undertaken to counter the crisis— had a disproportionate impact on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Malaysia and Korea. The study employs vector autoregressive (VAR) modeling to examine whether monetary tightening and the increase in spreads capturing the credit channel effects hurt SMEs incommensurately. The empirical results un...

As small businesses struggle to survive in the face of intense competitive pressures, an emerging strategy to help them involves using knowledge management tactics to harness their intellectual capital and improve their sustainable competitive advantage. This chapter discusses the issues involved with the transformation of small businesses into intelligent enterprises via knowledge management t...

Information and communications technologies (ICT) sit at the centre of lifelong learning policy in the UK. Considerable public expenditure is being applied to the creation of on-line learning and on-line learner information services. These are seen as having a major role in stimulating learning in the small business sector which has traditionally proved reluctant to engage in structured program...