Editor's Note: This paper was published on the Brookings Web site following discussions with the authors about small-and medium-enterprise research, which may inform Brookings' research in this area. It is intended to foster discussion about the policy issues and recommendations, and does not necessarily reflect the official view of Brookings, its board 2 or the advisory council members. For mo...

Supporting production and consumption of domestic goods is always a top priority in our country's economic and trade policy and a common approach in this regard, political and legal support and encourage the consumption of domestic goods by utilizing and stimulate patriotic feelings and pushing these feelings to use domestic goods and establish business of entrepreneurs. On this basis, the main...

The construction industry has been traditionally recognised as a fragmented sector associated with a poor level of implementation and penetration of Information Communication Technology (ICT) by Small to Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs). Cloud computing is a collective term that can facilitate the ability to collaborate within a central repository that can act as a base for interoperability betwe...

Constraint programming (CP) is an emergent software technology for declarative description and effective solution of large combinatorial problems, which has proven to be useful, especially in such areas as integrated production planning. In that context, the CP can be considered as a well-suited framework for the development of decision-making software supporting small and medium size enterpris...

Competitiveness and growth in the knowledge-based economy are directly linked both to the development of local innovation capacity and connectivity to global resources. Clusters and networks are emerging as significant tools to promote regional development, foster SME growth, reduce spatial and social inequalities, and to activate, diffuse and expand locally generated knowledge. The present wor...

In the context of the ECAMP IST European project we are designing a virtual community as a means for helping managers from Small Medium size Enterprises (SMEs) to better understand, develop, evaluate and implement ECommerce projects in the B2B area. In the first part of the paper, we evaluate the importance of designing virtual communities addressing SME managers, and in particular how such kno...

Software Process Improvement (SPI) ‘best practice’ models such as ISO 9000 and the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI) have been developed to assist software development organisations by harnessing their experience and providing them with support so that they can produce software products on time, within budget and to a high level of quality. However there is increasing evidence that th...

This paper describes an exploratory field study on the adoption of Application Service Provisioning (ASP) in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Rooted in Merton’s Motivation-Ability model of innovation, and based on an integrated multi-theoretical framework, several factors are identified, which drive and enable ASP adoption. The results of the survey indicate that the primary drivers f...

The principal objectives in this paper are to compare and contrast marketing management practices for a longitudinal sample of 871 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Australian manufacturing sector that have embarked upon different development pathways; and to examine possible connections between SME growth and the choice of marketing management practices. The results indicate tha...