This paper reports the outcomes of a two-phase investigation into leadership development in SMEs in the South West of England that aimed to devise an educational programme matched specifically to their needs. Phase One aimed to determine the demand for leadership development in SMEs in the Region by means of face-to-face interviews with 20 SME directors and was supported by interviews with lead...

As India is going to take prominent place in the world economy, the companies in India are drawing considerable attention. Though Indian companies are yet to become household names such as Ford, Coca-Cola, Toyota, or Sony, there are Indian companies such as Infosys, Reliance, and Tata Steel that have spread their name in significant ways outside India. When one looks at the so-called developed ...

Small enterprises play an important role in developing sustainable employment and economic growth in rural areas. The role of innovation that can mobilise to render enterprises more dynamic and competitive is well known. The purpose of the study is to assess how responsible owners/managers of SEs relate to innovation. Managers were sampled from two categories: size and sector of rural SEs. The ...

Enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) are now being implemented in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In addition to allowing for the integration of technological architectures, these systems make best practices available to small firms. This paper presents the results of a study that was aimed at identifying the dimensions of SMEs’ readiness for the adoption of this new technology.

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...

Today, success and worth of a business depend more on intellectual capital than physical capital. Hence, knowledge that exists within an organization is a sustainable source of competitive advantage, which makes Knowledge Management (KM) a critical input in the growth of any organization and more so in the case of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Even though much has been researched and wri...

Small agricultural production enterprises have been under immense economic pressures for many years. Many public policies have been suggested to alleviate the problem but no one has taken a look at the problem from a managerial or operations point of view. In this paper we develop models for supply chain issues facing small enterprises, solve them, and suggest their uses and future considerations.

Manufacturing systems involve decisions concerning production processes, capacity, planning, and control. In a MTO manufacturing systems, strategic decisions concerning fulfilment of customer requirement, manufacturing cost, and due date of delivery are the most important. In order to accelerate the decision making process, research on decision making structure when receiving order and sequenci...

The objective of this research is to investigate attitudes of management in Croatian small enterprises that use statistical methods towards statistical thinking in order to gain an insight into related issues. The research was conducted in 2013 using a web survey with a random sample of 631 Croatian small enterprises, but this paper focuses only on those enterprises that use statistical methods...

A key constraint for growing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is the business skills required to grow the enterprises through the stages of transformation. Criticism against growth stage models for SMEs is of concern, since these models contain the typical knowledge that appeals to managers of small enterprises as guidance in how to manage growth. In this article we propose the SMEAG model t...