This paper discusses the status of financial inclusion, education, and literacy in Azerbaijan as well as measures to foster the development of SMEs, which currently have inadequate access to financial resources. The primary policy challenge faced by the government of Azerbaijan is defining its...

Summary Statements emphasizing the major contribution of the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) for net job creation are quite frequent. Concerning the current definition of SMEs provided by the European Commission (EC), this paper makes a first attempt to approximate SMEs’ contribution...

Inter-company production networks can improve the resource efficiency of production processes. This book shows the results of the research project „Integrated Process Design for the Inter-Company Plant Layout Planning of Dynamic Mass Flow Networks“ (PepOn). A systematic approach for process...

Given that the long-term goal is to build a body of generalizable knowledge, so that each specific study does not have to start from scratch, I see a number of problems within the field of entrepreneurship and small business research. It should be stated from the start that the view of the...

Empirical research conducted on economic sectors in the U.S., Germany, Australia and Scotland has shown that factors such as age, size, location, legal form, and industry are related to business growth rates. Much of this research has focused on manufacturing firms thus providing little...

When the first author reviewed the literature on small firm growth in the mid 1980’s for his disserta-tion work, he noted that surprisingly few studies had focused on that specific problem (Davidsson 1989a; 1989b). Today, this is no longer true. In recent years ever more comprehensive lists of...

Firms face the challenge to survive and thrive in an increasingly competitive global market, developing strategies to continuously innovate, often having to do more with less. Increasing awareness of the benefits of stimulating continuous innovation in small and medium enterprises has led to the...

The approach to water management worldwide is currently in transition, with a shift evident from purely centralised infrastructure to greater consideration of decentralised technologies, such as rainwater harvesting (RWH). Initiated by recognition of drivers including increasing water demand and...