Following their larger counterparts, an increasing number of small firms outsource their IT tasks to lower cost offshore destinations. For small firms, however, offshore outsourcing is a difficult undertaking as it involves high transaction costs. Online marketplaces for IT services, which have...

The rapid internationalisation of the Polish economy has helped develop competitive export-led manufacturing and services sectors fostering robust growth and productivity performance. However, the benefits of this development have been unequal. Many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs),...

Plug and Play – The Era of Technology Convergence.Emergences of new technologies like Mobile, Cloud and robust payment gateways have enhanced the business models of e-commerce applications. Google pioneered the advertisement based revenue model. Amazon gave a whole new dimension to e-business...

As more and more activities in the economy become digitized, analytics and data-driven decision-making (DDD) are becoming increasingly important. The adoption of analytics and DDD has been slower in small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) compared to large firms, and reliable causal estimates of the...

The primary goal of this study is to elaborate and test of how commitment-based HR practices affect the innovative capacity of firms. While a remarkable wealth of knowledge has been accumulated on what accounts for small firm innovation including various internal and external factors, a void...

As a first step towards understanding the evolution of small groups in firms, this paper develops and tests a simple decision-theoretical model of research-unit evolution in which, as managers resolve their uncertainty over time, they shut down under-performing units and remove under-performing...

Past research has revealed that knowledge integration is an important prerequisite for the success of new product development. For this reason, companies deploy a number of formal mechanisms to foster integration across multiple functions and hierarchical levels. In many SMEs, however, such...

It is known that small firms rely mainly on the CEO’s individual knowledge for developing innovations. Recent work suggests that this approach is inefficient since it underutilizes other employees’ knowledge. We study to which extent using CEOs, managers and non-managerial employees’ ideas...

Vorliegendes Paper analysiert den Innovationserfolg von schwerpunktmäßig kleinen und mittelständischen Unternehmen (KMU) in der Region Jena auf Basis der Datensätze des Projektes KompNet2011 - Erfolgsfaktoren regionaler Innovationsnetze. Hierbei wird der Innovationserfolg sowohl mit Hilfe...

It is known that small firms rely mainly on the CEO's individual knowledge for developing innovations. Recent work suggests that this approach is inefficient since it under-utilizes other employees' knowledge. We study to which extent using CEOs, managers and non-managerial employees' ideas...