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To alert lenders, broker-dealers and municipal advisors to a joint regulatory notice from the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (“MSRB”) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (“FINRA”) regarding direct purchase or “bank loan” transactions.

Explains the MSRB and FINRA notice, why the notice was issued, what lenders should know about the notice, what broker-dealers and municipal advisors should know about the notice, and what MSRB rules could apply to bank loans.

Firms should determine whether state and local government obligations acquired through bank loan transactions constitute municipal securities for federal securities law purposes.

Review of a recently issued regulatory notice by experienced municipal securities lawyers.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model of competitiveness for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by investigating the structural relationship between organizational structure, knowledge quality (KQ) dimensions, improvisational creativity, compositional creativity and innovation in an emerging market – Malaysia – grounding in sense-making and organizational improvisational theories.

A total of 358 valid questionnaires administered among SMEs’ top management were used in examining the measurement model and structural relationship between latent constructs using partial least squares (PLS) path-modelling approach.

The findings indicate that a flat organizational structure influences business entities’ sense-making activities in the way they realize the intrinsic value of knowledge (intrinsic KQ) and take action to apply the organizational knowledge (actionable KQ). These sense-making activities are also conducive to SMEs’ improvisational creativity, compositional creativity and innovative capabilities. All KQ dimensions are positively interrelated, thus supporting sense-making theory.

A sustainable competitive advantage for SMEs requires a setting that is based on a lean, decentralized and cooperative organizational structure that shapes organizational KQ. As a contribution to the literature, accessibility KQ is introduced as a KQ dimension. Even though previous research was unclear on the reflectiveness/formativeness of KQ, by applying confirmatory tetrad analysis-PLS, this study empirically supports that KQ is a formative construct.