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The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss a distribution outsourcing alliance between a small‐to‐medium scale food processor and a national distributor of frozen and chilled food products. The paper discusses the influence of market dynamics, core and differentiated competencies and strategic intents on alliance formation and operations in the small‐to‐medium scale food enterprise sector.

The dyadic relationship of a small‐to‐medium scale food processor and its distributor is investigated through reviewing past studies of processor‐distributor alliances, conducting in‐depth face‐to‐face interviews with senior managers in both firms, and reviewing documents and correspondence between the firms.

The partners do not complement their core and differentiate competencies to achieve greater customer value creation through a joint enterprise business model. The alliance focuses pre‐eminently on short‐term sales development and cost savings targets. Non‐achievement of these targets adversely influences partners' trust and commitment to the alliance. A significant strength of the alliance is its capacity to identify customer needs and use this knowledge to speedily develop and introduce new products. In its present form this alliance is unsustainable. The partners should adopt a new philosophy and vision to pursue an alliance that will use their core and differentiated competencies more effectively.

To generalise the findings and inform theory building, the research has to be replicated in other businesses and market environments. The findings are specific to the market environment and strategies of a single small‐to‐medium scale food processor and a single national distributor of frozen and chilled foods. Multi‐case studies in multi‐contexts (capturing varying sizes of business, industry sectors, target market segments, competitive environments and market environments) have to be completed to enable generalisation and theory building.

This paper demonstrates the disadvantages of pursuing distribution outsourcing alliances with a short‐term and enterprise level perspective. The case study provides real life evidence of the benefits of pursuing distribution outsourcing alliances based on a joint enterprise philosophy.

This paper contributes to knowledge on distribution outsourcing alliances, a topic that several recent studies have identified as not having been explored in great detail in extant supply chain studies.

Small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) continue to make a major contribution to the Australian economy. However, research into organisational processes within SMEs has been limited to date. This study aims to examine the links between communication processes and organisational effectiveness in SMEs.

This quantitative study uses social capital theory as a framework to investigate whether employees' level of satisfaction with organisational communication processes affects organisational outcomes within three high growth manufacturing SMEs in one area of Australia.

Results indicate that organisational communication processes does affect employees' levels of ambiguity regarding customers, job satisfaction and commitment to their firms.

While generalisability is limited because of the small number of SMEs participating in the study, the research indicates great potential for developing theoretical and practical insights into Australian SMEs that would assist industry and employees overall.

Implications for the growth strategies of SMEs, particularly in relation to the current skilled labour shortage, are discussed.

The paper contributes much needed theoretical development and research into SMEs.

This paper presents research into the use of the Viable Systems Model (VSM) in small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Research on the VSM has been focussed on large organisations. The purpose of this paper is to explore the usefulness of the VSM in diagnosing issues of viability in SMEs.

Case study research was undertaken in which semi structured diagnostic interviews took place with SMEs using the VSM as a diagnostic tool. The aim was to investigate whether the VSM would assist in diagnosing problems with viability and whether it could then prescribe and facilitate improvements in operations. Qualitative case study evidence is presented that shows the results of these interventions.

The paper reports some examples of operational problems that were exposed through the intervention process and shows some general conclusions to support the use of VSM for analysing operations and supporting small business viability. A number of “threats to viability” themes were apparent and these are discussed.

The semi‐structured interview protocol created for the research could be used to diagnose viability issues in other SMEs and thus is of practical relevance to other organisations.

The VSM originates from the theory of cybernetics which can be broadly defined as “the science of effective organisation”. Previous use of the model has focused upon the viability of large organisations; the applicability of the VSM in a small business operational context has received little attention. The paper demonstrates the benefits of the using the VSM to pinpoint problems that threaten SME viability.

Small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) constitute 90 percent of all enterprises in Iran. Thus they have an important role in the development of the country. SMEs need to utilise management systems, especially quality systems such as the ISO 9000 series, in their operations. The purpose of this paper is to address the following questions: to what extent do the performances of SMEs change before and after acquiring the ISO 9000 certification and how far do they differ from non‐ISO certified companies?

The authors have studied a sample of SMEs, comprising those that have acquired the ISO 9000 certification after the end of September 2004 and were located in Greater Tehran. Based on the literature review, the authors designed the following methodology to survey the selected SMEs: they developed a questionnaire containing 27 questions relevant to advantages of acquiring ISO certification and sent the same to the selected SMEs; then analysed the responses and performed non‐parametric tests such as sign‐test and chi‐squared test; and they used Minitab and SPSS to analyse the data.

Acquiring the ISO 9000 certification appeared to improve the performance of SMEs in the sample studied. In other words, SMEs have benefited from achieving the ISO 9000 certification.

This paper will help the non‐ISO certified SMEs to consider investing in development and deployment of a suitable quality management system, preferably leading to certification under the ISO 9000 standard. It will also help the ISO‐certified SMEs to build on their success and move to apply a suitable performance assessment and improvement model such as the EFQM.

In many tourism country destinations the dominant structure is that of small‐to‐medium enterprises (SMEs). They are prevalent for example in the hotel trade, travel agencies, tourism transport systems and the many tourism‐related attractions. In contrary, in new destinations in emerging economies and developing countries that have strong tourism sectors the big corporations and chains are particularly well represented. Each of these sectors — the big corporations and the chains that operate on an industrial scale on the one hand, and the smaller type of business on the other — has its own characteristic structural advantages and disadvantages.

Small to medium enterprises (SMEs) are often perceived as a fertile area for the formation of effective networks. However, research to date has focused primarily on large companies. There seems to be a lack of rigorous research reported in the literature that tests the relationship between networking practices and business excellence. Quantitative data was gathered from a stratified random sample of SME site managers in the Australian manufacturing industry. A total of 550 manufacturing sites were sent the questionnaire from which a response rate of 20 percent was achieved. Networking practices regression (NPR) models were developed in order to test the strength of the relationship between key components of networking practice and several dimensions of business excellence such as success rate of new products, reduction in waste, increased market opportunities, etc. The data was analyzed using techniques available on the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) for Windows software package. The paper concludes that groupings of network practices are required to explain business excellence. This means that a single networking practice is not sufficient to explain business excellence significantly. The most significant networking practices were found to be: searching and incorporating diverse points of view; challenging the status quo; learning from failures; communicating with people outside the company, including experts; allocation of resources to support communication linkages. The main implication of the research results for SME managers is that a typical manufacturing SME is more likely to improve its chances of achieving business excellence with networking practices than without these practices.

The purpose of this paper is to increase our understanding of why firms, specifically small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), participate in a programme for competence development and why firms use different strategies for competence development.

A study of 17 SMEs that all received support from the European Social Fund, Objective 3 programme. The collection of data is based on semi‐structured interviews with management/owners, internal project leaders, employees and union representatives, feedback seminars with representatives from the studied enterprises, and on analysis of documents.

The findings demonstrate that all SMEs reported driving forces for competence development relating to both external organizational conditions and internal organizational conditions, to at least a certain degree. Furthermore, there appears to be a strong relationship between observed patterns of driving forces and the strategy for competence development used by the firm.

The SMEs that experience a relatively stronger driving force for competence development initiate problem‐solving efforts to design and implement more elaborated strategies for competence development. The SMEs that experience a lesser degree of driving force for competence development implement less elaborated strategies for competence development.

The paper finds that both external and internal organizational conditions are important in understanding why SMEs undergo competence development programme. Furthermore, the importance of external and internal organizational conditions is not only limited to why the companies participate in a programme for competence development, but also for how they participate, i.e. the strategies used for competence development.

Society now expects the universities it funds to work with citizens and communities to enable them to flourish in sustainable ways. One particular aspect of this concerns support for small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) which, more than ever, need universities to help them cost effectively be innovative, and at the leading edge, for markets which are now global in outreach. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the kinds of approach and leadership that academics must put into their academic practices, in order to creatively and constructively lead local partnerships – partnerships that will be both successful and sustainable.

In total, 185 rigorous cases studies were undertaken of successful university outreach activity in 30 universities across Europe. Senior staff of those universities used their collective judgment to determine the 16 “best leaders” of these projects in terms of entrepreneurial skills and wealth‐creating impacts. These leaders were then thematically interviewed and videoed, and their immediate staff indicated what leadership characteristics best described them. All data were content analysed. Then the best practice approaches, which actually helped SMEs, were elicited and the qualities of the 16 leaders were revealed.

Best practice projects, from all studied, clearly showed a “virtuous knowledge sharing” cycle, where holistic and co‐creating inter‐disciplinary team‐working was the norm. Teams of academics and SME partners in these projects worked extremely closely together to co‐produce “real world” solutions. While often “reluctant leaders”, the academics who normally drove these entrepreneurial projects to success had all of the characteristics often ascribed to leaders, as described in the general leadership literature. However, in the case of these university reach‐out leaders, these entrepreneurial academics had a particular focus in striving to be “democratically empowering”; their aspiration was to ensure innovative skills were successfully passed onto others in their teams, including their external partners, to enable powerful and collective co‐creation.

This paper has profound social implications, especially in our present global financial extreme, as it focuses on the kinds of leadership that academics should put into practice in order to work more creatively and effectively with local SME partnerships. The approach has also shown how such leadership can also lead to successful social enterprises in their own right.

The working of universities with SMEs is very much a Cinderella area in higher education research. The approach described in this paper deals with this topic in an evidential and highly innovative way. It uniquely heralds, and describes in some detail, a new kind of university which strives to co‐identify problems worthy of exploration with local partners, the kind of co‐learning that engenders co‐creation and co‐design, and also the co‐production with local SMEs that can lead them to survive and to flourish. This has recently been recognized by the PASCAL International Observatory for place management, social capital and learning regions, which has adopted the approach in its “Universities for a Modern Renaissance programme”.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model that can be used to predict which small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) are more likely to become adopters of enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, SCM and e‐procurement).

Direct interviews were used to collect data from a random sample of SMEs located in the Northwest of England. Using logistic regression, 102 responses were analysed.

The results reveal that the factors influencing SMEs' adoption of enterprise systems are different from the factors influencing SMEs' adoption of other previously studied information systems (IS) innovations. SMEs were found to be more influenced by technological and organisational factors than environmental factors. Moreover, the results indicate that firms with a greater perceived relative advantage, a greater ability to experiment with these systems before adoption, greater top management support, greater organisational readiness and a larger size are predicted to become adopters of enterprise systems.

Although this study focused on the factors that influence SMEs' adoption of a set of enterprise systems (i.e. ERP, CRM, SCM and e‐procurement), it fails to differentiate between factors that influence each of these systems.

The model can be used to assist software vendors not only to develop marketing strategies that can target potential adopters, but also to develop strategies to increase the adoption of ES among SMEs.

The paper contributes to the continuing research in IS innovations adoption/diffusion in the small business context.

Examines the penetration of the small‐ to medium‐sized enterprise (SME) sector by the rapidly growing practice of benchmarking, hitherto more usually employed by large companies. The specific needs of this business type have to date been sadly neglected by both academic and governmental attempts at disseminating “best practice”. Following a survey of over 200 SMEs, which clearly identified a “performance information gap”, the author has undertaken extensive quantitative and qualitative interviews with 25 senior managers, and built a picture of both current usage and the perceived or actual barriers to greater use of the technique. Concludes that the practice of benchmarking in SMEs is embryonic, that little progress can be made by even enlightened managers until the barriers are understood, and that a range of tools and techniques which are capable of accommodating the idiosyncrasies of small businesses need to be developed and made accessible.