Purpose – The purpose of this research is to evaluate the longitudinal effect of innovation programmes on improving the process of innovation in manufacturing SMEs. The process of innovation in organisations covers people, process and technology. Therefore interventions in the form of...

Purpose – Research has shown that employers in small businesses may not provide, or fund, off‐the‐job training for reasons including that they believe that no training was considered necessary in their business. The research reported in this paper aims to focus on a study of...

The delivery of assistance to SMEs, provided by enterprise councils at the local level, can vary between those bodies which are innovative and those which are pedestrian in their approach. Although it is generally accepted that most small firms in the UK sell to local markets, SMEs based within...

The relevance and importance of the high technology small firm sector to economies has been discussed by a number of authors and new technology‐based firms (NTBFs) have been viewed as having a very important role to play in job creation and as the seedbed of emerging industries. This paper...

As market trends evolve and core business activities shift into new territories, there is a need for companies to facilitate a corresponding change in the skills base of the workforce. This paper reports the findings of a European Social Fund (ESF) Objective 4 project, which was carried out...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of business improvement methods (BIM/TQM) in contributing to innovation implementation in SMEs within peripheral regions. Design/methodology/approach – A survey with responses from 606 SMEs in the North West European...