Economic convergence is a major aim of the EU. Innovation and investment in economically weaker regions are key steps to foster convergence • Public institutions and the regulatory environment for investments differ substantially across EU member states and increase economic disparities •...

Private businesses’ nominal value added in Greece has fallen by 38 percent over the last ten years. Micro firms were hit particularly hard. Despite efforts to stabilize the macroeconomic environment, there are only weak signs of recovery. Future prospects are not much better, as—with the...

Die Auswertung neu verfügbarer Daten zeigt, dass die Wertschöpfung griechischer Privatunternehmen in den letzten zehn Jahren nominal um 38 Prozent eingebrochen ist. Besonders stark traf es dabei Kleinstunternehmen. Trotz aller Bemühungen, das makroökonomische Umfeld zu stabilisieren, hat...

This paper studies the impact of research and development (R&D) and innovation on employment growth, focusing on small and medium-sized firms. Employment effects of R&D and innovation are unclear a priori as process innovation may be labor-saving or labor might have complementarities with other...

The objective of the present study is to analyse the effect of technological cooperation on SMEs performance consideringtwo dimensions: technological and economic results. For that purpose, we use a data set containing information about participants in research joint ventures supported by the...

The literature on debt restructuring usually assumes that banks behave in a uniform way towards firms in distress. Using a recent survey of Italian banks, we show that banks follow different strategies when they decide whether to take part in the workout process, in that some of them do...

We evaluated the execution of the operational programs (OPs) committed to encouraging the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). To achieve this goal, we employed a novel three-stage weighted Russel directional distance (WRDD)...

The study examines the hypothesis that firms engaging customers in value co-creation tend to display more innovativeness. As such, it is one of the few quantitative studies on the link between these two concepts. Customer engagement in value co-creation was operationalized as a multiple scale...

In this study, we examine the prevalence of different KM practices and the organizational determinants of KM among SMEs by conducting a quantitative study of empirical data from nearly 500 Dutch SMEs. Our empirical results show that knowledge is managed in a people-based approach in SMEs. SMEs...

Social networks matter in the innovation processes of young and small firms, since lsquo;innovation does not exist in a vacuum (Van De Ven, 1986: 601).' The contacts a firm has could both generate advantages for further innovation and growth, and disadvantages leading to inertia and stagnation....