Business Models and Innovative Technologies for SMEs focuses on technologies such as data analytics, artificial intelligence and data as a service. As these technologies offer new possibilities, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) often struggle to grasp their full potential within evolving business landscapes. Five reviews discuss the potential of these technologies to drive SME growth. The book also highlights the need for a strategic approach to overcoming challenges faced by SMEs to create innovative business models such as limited resources, infrastructure hurdles, and financial limitations. The chapters explore diverse facets of business model innovation, covering strategic models for mobile application development, the critical role of cybersecurity culture, readiness assessments, digital transformations leveraging artificial intelligence, expert systems' impact on competitiveness, and the adoption of data as services in SMEs. Each chapter is tailored to provide actionable insights drawn from theory and, where possible, real-life case studies, addressing questions related to technological benefits, innovative strategies, and challenges in implementing digital transformations for SMEs. This book caters to a wide audience of academics, researchers, policymakers, and business practitioners deeply invested in SME development, offering practical solutions and theoretical frameworks. The combination of scholarly and practical approaches towards developing and implementing innovative strategies, makes it a valuable resource for readers seeking to understand and support SME growth. Readership Academics, Entrepreneurs, Business consultants in the SME sector.

Despite potentially tremendous benefits, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) lag in the digital transformation. Emerging technologies, as diverse as they are, offer a range of applications for them to improve performance and overcome the size-related limitations they face in doing business. However, SMEs must be better prepared, and stakes are high. SMEs make the most of the industrial fabric in many countries and regions, they create jobs (most jobs sometimes) and are the cement of inclusive and sustainable societies.

This book analyses the determining factors behind productivity and innovation amongst Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore, and within the context of South East Asia, in order to offer recommendations for increasing productivity and aiding economic growth. SME firms are an influential driver of economic growth in advanced world economies like the USA, Germany, Japan and South Korea. Throughout the 2000s, Singapore experienced a decline in economic growth which was linked to decreasing productivity in its SMEs. The decline triggered a transformational policy by a Government intent on forging a ‘high skill–high productivity’ future. Given substantial evidence that low productivity growth occurred in sectors where immigrants dominated the workforce, the seeds of recovery focused on improving productivity and innovation amongst SMEs in those sectors. Hence, this book investigates the factors determining productivity amongst SMEs across the manufacturing sector. It utilises personal interviews with global experts and CEOs, combined with primary data collected from a major international Delphi survey, and interviews with 215 SME owners and managers in Singapore. This data helps us to better understand how these productivity-enhancing factors can be used to increase performance amongst SMEs. By investigating the nature and process of total factor productivity in Singapore’s SMEs, this book tells the policy story behind the revolution. To provide a comparative analysis, Singapore’s story is placed within a South East Asian context. The unfolding narrative contains important lessons for policy makers and industry globally, as they assess the strategic choices available to them for improving productivity and innovation. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of innovation and productivity, as well as economic development officers, government policy advisors, SME business managers and sustainable businesses.

SMEs are significant job creators and drivers of innovation and competition in most economic sectors. Furthermore, the traditional constraints of small and medium enterprises, such as geographic operations, are now being dissolved by technological developments. This means that there are new opportunities for SMEs, and their fundamental principles are being redefined: the aims, competencies, strategy, management, practice, and scope of these businesses are changing, with wide-ranging implications. This is the second part of a two volume work that incorporates scientific chapters on SME business theory and practice. Authors provide a balanced perspective of the present and future of SMEs across all business disciplines, for example management, strategy, marketing, economics and finance. While Volume I focuses on the individual SME and internal issues such as innovation, quality, and digitization, this second volume explores external issues such as contextual forces, the effects of the financial crisis, and macro-economic effects.

Digital Transformation in African SMES: Emerging Issues and Trends aims to shed light on the various advantages and drawbacks of the same along with the opportunities and markets that are emerging because of digital transformation. This book provides comprehensive insights into the role of electronic commerce in the success of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in developing countries, with a specific focus on Africa (Chapter 1). Chapter 2 explores the nexus between digital transformation and SME performance, offering perspectives from developing economies. The challenges faced by SMEs in Africa regarding the adoption of Big Data are examined in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 delves into the exploration of email marketing strategies among SMEs. Additionally, the book covers factors influencing the adoption of Big Data by SMEs in Africa (Chapter 5) and investigates the use of technology by SMEs and its impact on the firms (Chapter 6). Chapter 7 focuses on key factors and impacts related to the adoption of social media by Small and Medium Enterprises. The volume provides information for educators at all levels to obtain a complete understanding of the technology-based environment that impacts teaching and commerce. It also serves as a resource for policymakers, businessmen, researchers, and university and college students, interested in digital transformation in Africa.

The Scoreboard presents data for a number of debt, equity and financing framework condition indicators for financing SMEs and entrepreneurs.

This report discusses how the digital transformation – digital technologies, data and software, AI-based analytics and other advances – is changing innovation processes and outcomes. It highlights the general trends across the economy and factors behind sector-specific dynamics, including increasing use of data as a key input for innovation, the expanding possibilities for experimentation offered by virtual simulation, 3D printing and other digital technologies, and the growing focus on services innovation enabled by digital technologies.

What is the role of culture in the innovation dynamic of small firms within the context of their territorial environments? How do shared values, beliefs and practices underpin the knowledge production process that leads to innovation? In what way do symbolic aspects of social life shape European SMEs’ innovation processes? This volume gives an extensive insight into the complex links between culture and innovation in one of the key agents of economic life: SMEs and micro firms. The chapters employ different analytical and methodological strategies in regions of Europe to identify dimensions of culture, especially values, norms, skills and institutions, and to scrutinize which specific components of culture are relevant to firm innovation and to the more general dynamics of regional innovation. The original research presented shows how small firms learn, interact, compete and collaborate with other key agents of the innovation system. Taken as a whole, the volume points the way towards a more comprehensive framework for understanding the nature of innovation in SMEs and micro firms. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of European Planning Studies.

Smaller companies are abundant in the business realm and outnumber large companies by a wide margin. Understanding the inner workings of small businesses offers benefits to the consumers and the economy. The Handbook of Research on Intrapreneurship and Organizational Sustainability in SMEs is a critical scholarly resource that examines the strategies and concepts that will assist small and medium-sized enterprises to achieve competitiveness. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as financial management, corporate sustainability, and organizational culture, this publication is geared towards business managers, professionals, graduate students, and researchers working in the field of smaller-scale business development initiatives.

This publication presents the findings of the OECD review of SME and Entrepreneurship Policy in Viet Nam. It offers an in-depth examination of the performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurship in Viet Nam, the quality of the business environment, and national policies in support of new and small businesses.