Special Issue: Business support, firm growth, management development and learning in SMEs

摘要

This special issue of the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation focuses on the role of business support in the interlinked and symbiotic processes of firm growth, management development and learning in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It draws on papers from the 'business support' track of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship Conference, held in November 2010 in London, UK, and a discussion of business assistance that took place at the Academy of Management in Montreal in August 2010. The four refereed papers in this issue (Table 1) all link business support with wider issues of firm growth, management development and learning (Achtenhagen et al, 2010; Leitch et al, 2010). Previously, these concepts have been considered as separate phenomena. Researchers have linked management development on its own to growth (Coetzer et al, 2011) and work on SME learning has tended to focus on just organizational learning or entrepreneurial learning (Lee, 2010; Hansen and Hamilton, 2011).