In conjunction with America Makes, the nation’s leading and collaborative partner in additive manufacturing (AM) and 3D printing technology and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Penn State’s Center for Innovative Materials Processing through Direct Digital Deposition is sending an open invitation to Small to Medium Enterp...

S mall businesses are a critical feature of the U.S. political and economic landscape. Businesses with fewer than 500 employees account for almost half of all gross revenues generated by U.S. businesses, employ half of all private-sector workers, and generate between 60 and 80 percent of net new jobs. Many policymakers, interested in supporting small businesses and entrepreneurship, have been c...

The U.S. Small Business Administration defines small businesses as having fewer than 500 employees. Over 99 percent of all U.S. businesses are small businesses, and from 1992 to 1996, small businesses created all of the net new jobs [1]. Yet, reference to the literature on software engineering suggests strongly that implementation of software engineering process models, such as the Software Eng...

There are between 400,000 – 500,000 hairdressing establishments in the European Union which receive around 350 million potential customers per year. Italy has the largest number of businesses in the sector (73,000 in 2012), followed by Germany and France (over 65,000 businesses per country). The sector is also sizable in terms of number of businesses in the Czech Republic, Poland, Spain and the...

This paper estimates the private returns to four different kinds of R&D spending on the probability of Irish and foreign-owned businesses engaging in product, process and organizational innovation. By providing econometric analysis of nearly 2000 businesses in the Community Innovation Survey: 2004 to 2006, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of the effects of Irish innovatio...

The greatest challenge facing the indigenisation of African economies is the problem of succession. A Mean businesses have always died with their founders. This phenomenon is caused by failure by the business founders to properly plan for the succession. Drawing from a case study of 10 smallscale indigenous businesses in Zimbabwe and from literature on African indigenous businesses, this articl...

Conceptualising B2C businesses as an innovative class of technology-infused services yields insights into the factors that may lead to success or failure of such businesses. This paper draws from and adapts concepts from services marketing literature and recent thinking on Internet service metrics to present a framework for understanding and analysing B2C businesses.

The article examines the emerging shift in businesses towards Web 2.0 principles, concepts and technologies. The principles, concepts and technologies of Web 2.0 are gaining momentum and a number of businesses are adopting them. There are varying and diffused understanding of Web 2.0 parameters and characteristics leading to multitude of interpretations. Therefore a framework for understanding ...