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Peter Wyer, Bob Barrett and Konstantinos Biginas
The purpose of this chapter is to examine what small business strategic management and long-term planning involves as practised by successful growth-oriented small businesses. The…
Abstract
Chapter Contribution
The purpose of this chapter is to examine what small business strategic management and long-term planning involves as practised by successful growth-oriented small businesses. The aim is to provide insight into the strategic learning, control and development processes, including indicative detail of the underpinning day-to-day practices and actions that make up those processes. Key focus is the overall strategic control activity of more progressive owner managers and their use of an idiosyncratic mentally held ‘strategic planning and thinking framework’ that guides and informs strategic decision-making, strategic adjustment to existing markets, products and processes activities and long-term strategic direction.
The research approach is underpinned and informed by personal construct theory which gives emphasis to the highly complex nature of the task of small business strategic control and highlights the need for a creative and innovative research methodology to facilitate close and detailed investigation of the phenomenon. To this end, a multidisciplinary case study research methodology was developed by the authors to underpin examination of strategic development and planning within micro-, small- and medium-sized businesses.
The chapter enhances understanding of small business strategic management practice in growth-achieving micro and small enterprises. The findings of this research, whilst demonstrating the key role of entrepreneurial learning in small firm strategic control of the uncertain external environment, also provides a multidimensional lens through which to dissect and better understand the small firm strategy development process – drawing upon and integrating grains of truth from the differing schools of management thought embedded in the literature.
The findings of this study also facilitate the addressing of the ‘black box’ of hazy insight within the literature which fails to reveal micro-level fine detail understanding of the managerial and organisational actions and activities that make up strategy process. The authors commence provision of such black box insight within this chapter – this as lead-through to the follow-on chapter which affords specific attention to enhancing understanding of the micro-level fine detail minutia of managerial, organisational and work activities that make up strategy process within small businesses.
The research is of a comparative dimension focussing on small business development within the developed economy context of the UK, the emerging economy contexts of Malaysia and Ghana and the transitional economy contexts of Russia. Thus, time and resource limitations bound the studies.
This chapter reports on a study of the benefits of the Integrated Education in Agricultural Entrepreneurship (IEAE). IEAE substantially covers the transfer of knowledge, skills…
Abstract
This chapter reports on a study of the benefits of the Integrated Education in Agricultural Entrepreneurship (IEAE). IEAE substantially covers the transfer of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that will allow in each farmer-learner to plan, to launch, and to manage his/her own business and it should be approached from leadership perspective and as a life-long learning process. Entrepreneurship constitutes an important factor that determines the level of economic growth, competitiveness, employment, and social prosperity of a small country such as Greece (Spanoudaki, 2008). For purposes of this chapter agricultural entrepreneurship is defined as an effort developed individually or collectively for the exploitation of resources that the individual or the team allocates for the production of useful agricultural products, services, or goods connected with the production of agricultural products and their distribution in the market, satisfying market needs. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (Bosma & Levie, 2010), entrepreneurship is conceptualized as each effort for building a new business or a new activity, such as the free profession, where the creation of a new business, or the extension of an existing one, is done by an individual or by teams of individuals, from public institutions or from established private businesses.