The paper analyzes empirical evidence from 368 environmentally responsive small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in four industries. The results demonstrate that firms' environmental performance cannot be viewed as a one‐dimensional concept and that determinants of firms' environmental performance depend on the dimension retained. The impacts of firms' environmental performance on their innovativeness and competitiveness vary according to the industry within which they operate. However, impacts on product and process innovations as well as on managerial innovations are positive and significant in all four industries.
The research proposes a model, which relates the following variables: (a) the CEO's perceptions of the environment, (b) the strategic business orientation, scanning, and structural characteristics, (c) technology policy, (d) realized innovative efforts of the firm, and (e) measures of firm performance. The empirical data from small manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) that share a common economic and industrial environment show that CEOs' perceptions of external environment---and not objective measures---are key significant issues with respect to technology policy formulation and enactment in SMEs and its subsequent organizational impacts. In particular, perceived environmental hostility and dynamism are shown to have specific and differing moderating roles on the form and strength of the relationships between technology policy and its determinants and between technology policy and realized innovative efforts. Furthermore, a more aggressive technology policy leads to greater realized innovative efforts, which in turn are positively related to export performance and, to a lesser extent, to financial performance.strategic management of technology, small firms, strategy enactment, perceptions of the external environment
Empirical research into business-to-business e-commerce issues involving manufacturing small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is still embryonic. In an attempt to partially fill this gap, this paper presents empirical data from an electronic survey conducted among 96 manufacturing SMEs to investigate e-commerce initiatives and their related benefits. E-commerce initiatives are assessed using a set of 36 business processes that can be conducted electronically. These processes were classified according to their focus: customer (downstream), supplier (upstream) or in-house. The research findings point to four main profiles of manufacturing SMEs with different e-commerce focuses. The first group seems to lack any focus or may still be exploring e-commerce opportunities. The second and third groups are supplier-and customer-focused, respectively. The fourth group consists of the more involved SMEs that have leveraged their e-commerce initiatives with
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