Turning the difficulty into blessing-Operating Competitive SMEs during crisis: Current Management
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to study the drivers of Small and Medium Sized enterprises (SMEs) competitiveness in sectors of the Greek manufacturing industry, both in the pro and during economic crisis era (i.e. covering the time period of 2003-2008 and 2009-2011 respectively), based on firm level financial and qualitative data set attempting to identify key issues for Greek SMEs regarding their competitive characteristics. Although considerable empirical work has been done on this subject, research on the topic is limited for the Greek manufacturing SMEs. A Competitiveness Index is developed in order to measure the competitiveness level of Greek SMEs. The method to determine the drivers of competitiveness in Greek manufacturing SMEs is novel and using several factors associated with firms’ knowledge management, information technology, innovation and absorptive capacity of technological indicators in combination with other financial data presenting the drivers of competitiveness especially during the crisis period.
Keywords: SMEs, Competitive Index, Management perspectives, Crisis period