In order to increase the economic opportunities available, enterprise development plays a crucial role in the progression of socio-economic development for small and medium enterprises. Enterprise Development in SMEs and Entrepreneurial Firms: Dynamic Processes explores the process of enterprise development and its reconstruction of entrepreneurial identities, critical competencies as well as market turnaround for SMEs. This book aims to be a critical resource in the understanding of enterprise strategies adopted and lessons learned for management development. It is a successful resource for students, researchers and professionals interested in the growth SMEs.

Providing an introduction to the establishment, development and managerial issues confronting the smaller enterprise, this text is particularly concerned with the kinds of action and behaviour that seem to characterise successful new business ventures.

Recent decades have seen substantial growth in the range of assistance programmes for SMEs and entrepreneurs across the world. Once regarded as peripheral to the economy and public policy, the role of small firms and of entrepreneurship is now recognized as of key importance in the economic growth and development strategies of many nations. The range of interventions and support focused on promoting SMEs and entrepreneurship is substantial and expanding, so Government, SMEs and Entrepreneurship Development asks ’what are some of the main policy instruments being used, and how effective are they?’ It considers policies in different countries, examines key interventions and tools used to promote entrepreneurship and SME development and concludes with contributions on how to best evaluate their effectiveness. The contributor chapters by academics and practitioners from businesses, enterprise development agencies and governments, are empirical or evidence-based and use both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Drawing on experience from a wide range of both developed and emerging countries and economies, the contributions focus on the broad strategies that different governments and communities have adopted to foster entrepreneurship and SMEs; the policy tools and instruments that can be used to promote small business and entrepreneurship; and on the outcomes of policy instruments and the methods used to evaluate interventions. Their findings will help researchers, policy-makers, economic development officers, civil servants, elected officials, and business associations to better understand the issues in this important field.

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.

In this extended and novel entrepreneurial analysis of small firm inception and growth, a leading authority in the field develops a new kind of ‘micro-micro’ analysis, applying rigorous methods from economics, accounting and finance to gain a deeper understanding of micro-firms, examining performance, hierarchy, capital structure, monitoring and control, flexibility, innovation, and information systems.

The process of founding new enterprises and making them grow and prosper is a far more convoluted undertaking than it was just a few decades ago. This book explores the complexity faced by today s entrepreneurs. Institutional boundaries, evolutionary perspectives and the intricacies of management are the central themes in this study of entrepreneurs and SMEs in a world marked by major transitions. While mainstream research enhances our understanding of the dynamics of the entrepreneurial process, this book progresses the research yet further. It examines another fundamental role of research in entrepreneurship: our understanding of future organizational and managerial forms evolving from the globalization process. Issues addressed include: growth patterns among enterprises initiated by science-and-technology-based entrepreneurs the actions and motives driving radical entrepreneurs the role of experience versus formal education in entrepreneurship the role of endogenous growth processes managerial complexity in new knowledge-based enterprises the role of collaboration for innovation in new business ventures. The contributors aim to further encourage dialogue and reflections triggered by the growing emphasis on entrepreneurship in policy agendas and business communities all over Europe. As such, this book will prove stimulating reading for researchers, students, academics, consultants and advisers involved in entrepreneurship, business and management.

This timely and incisive Handbook provides critical contemporary insights into the theory and practice of entrepreneurship and marketing in the twenty-first century. Bringing together rich and varied contributions from prominent international researchers, it offers a reflective synthesis of scholarship at the interface between marketing and entrepreneurship.