Nearly 99% of all U.S. firms are small businesses and roughly half the private sector employees work for a small business. Yet surprisingly little research attention is given to IT and its role in small firms; neither from the small consumer nor producer perspective. This area is of increasing importance, as small firms struggle to grow and gain competitive advantage against the backdrop of rap...

Adopting an entrepreneurial orientation is accepted as strategy through which to improve the performance of small firms. The management of innovation literature indicates that firms seeking to survive in rapidly changing and/or highly competitive markets are being advised to consider participating in business networks. By combining these two concepts it is hypothesised that four different marke...

This study compares the impact of different Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) factors on the web site adoption decision in small and large firms. A survey that was undertaken by the National Institute of Statistics on the use of Information Technologies (IT) by firms in Portugal was used as the empirical basis for this study. We found significantly differences in the factors that determ...

The increasingly strategic use of patents, and their importance for competitive advantage, pose special challenges for small high-tech firms. This paper seeks to add to our understanding of the strategic and economic effects of patents by exploring why small high-tech firms take out patents – and why not – and how these choices are linked to these firms’ broader business and technology strategi...

It seems surprising that small firms engage in offshore outsourcing given that they lack the resources that large firms possess to overcome the difficulties involved. We examine these factors using transaction cost theory’s three stages: contact costs, contract costs, and control costs. Then, using our field data from small client firms (in the United States and the United Kingdom), intermediar...

Despite extensive investigation of the Indian software industry, knowledge about small software firms is inadequate. This knowledge is important as many developing countries are contemplating the software industry as a means of national growth along the lines that India has taken. This paper provides a descriptive analysis of small software firms in India. It shows that small software firms tha...

This study examines the extent to which Information and Communication Technology (ICT) capability is possessed and utilised by technology-based small firms and investigates the contingent effect of firm size and age on ICT capability. The empirical base is a survey with data from 291 technology-based small Swedish firms. The result suggests that technology-based small firms are high users of IC...

This paper argues that individual small firms, just like large firms, place differing emphasis on strategy-making and may employ different modes of strategy-making. It offers a typology of the different modes of strategy-making that seem most likely to exist in small firms, and hypothesises how this typology relates to performance. It then describes the results of an empirical study of the stra...

Financing constrains on investment are mainly important for small privately owned firms. Yet most of the investment literature focuses on the financing constraints of large publicly owned firms. This paper develops a financing constraints test based on a variable capital investment equation. Because it does not require the information about marginal q, the test can be easily applied to small fi...