University - SMEs Collaboration to Support the Economic Growth: A Mauritian Case Study

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) make a substantial contribution to economic growth and employment in most countries around the world including the Small Island Developing States (SIDS). Most countries have set up schemes to encourage creation of new SMEs as well as expansion of existing businesses. Many of the SMEs are family businesses and are managed by the owners/entrepreneurs. The SMEs usually face great difficulty when it comes to expansion as they lack the technical know-how to support the expansion plan and very often the cost of the equipment coupled with lack of financial support prevent many of these companies to even think of new investment. They are also not willing to share too much information about their companies due to competition and tax evasion purposes. In many Small Island Developing States (SIDS) the market is very limited and it may be difficult for the SMEs to export their products, hence further limiting investment. The cost of state of the art equipment available off the shelf are usually very high and very often they are loaded with lots of functions that may not be required by the specific SMEs. Local Universities can support SMEs by designing low cost equipment to meet their needs. There must be a proper coordination and support between University, SMEs, an appropriate institution doing the link between University and SMEs and the funding institutions. The government, through the funding institutions, can provide a fraction of the funds to develop the prototype. Many small projects have already been considered by the University of Mauritius and two such projects are discussed in this paper. The design and implementation (in some cases) clearly show that there is a possibility of collaboration between Universities and SMEs together with the help of appropriate institutions in SIDS to support the sector.Keywords: Small and Medium Enterprises, University Collaboration, Small Island Developing State

Sectoral innovation performance in the knowledge intensive services

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Evaluating a Data Distribution Service System for Dynamic Manufacturing Environments: A Case Study

AbstractSmall and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) in Europe struggle to incorporate industrial robots in their production environments, while large enterprises use these robots for large batch production only. The paradigm shift from mass production to mass personalization decreases batch sizes and changes the approach to implementation of industrial robots in manufacturing environments. It also opens doors for SMEs to further incorporate robots in their production environments. The goal of this research is to evaluate the suitability of a data-centric, distributed, decentralized manufacturing system for cooperation between robots and humans. A case is presented featuring cooperation between robots and humans. A control system is proposed based on distributed intelligence and decentralized control, to handle the rapidly expanding complexity in dynamic manufacturing environments. The communication in such a distributed environment is provided by a Data Distribution Service system; an extendible, flexible approach to communication. Key issues that are encountered in implementing the cooperation into the current industrial environments are identified. The proposed control system is projected on the case and evaluated for application suitability and expected performance

The E-commerce Potential for Home-based Businesses: a Case Study

In Jakarta, the e-Business adoption has not only captured the interest of large organizations but has also been acknowledged and adopted by small, medium and micro sized enterprises. Mostly, these small and medium e-commerce-adopted companies are called Home-Based Business. The object of this research is a family home-based business which is adopted e-commerce system. The commonly used software development method is System Development Life Cycle (SDLC), and The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is generally accepted as the standard modeling notation for the analysis and design of the object that oriented on software systems. This research concludes that a web-based system can addressed the need of home-based business to expand the market scope by the internet penetration as one alternative to do the business expansion

Enabling customers engagement and collaboration for small and medium-sized enterprises in ubiquitous multi-channel ecosystems

Over the last few years, we have encountered an exponential growth in online communication opportunities. Organizations have more and more ways to connect and engage with their current or future customers. The existence of more opportunities in connecting to people can be both an enabler and a burden. Being present at a multitude of different channels requires the effective management of a very large number of adapted contents, formats, and interaction patterns fulfilling the communication and cooperation needs of distributed target groups. In this respect, we integrate existing fragmented communication and monitoring approaches into a full-fledged communication model as a basis for an adequate engagement approach. We describe applications of our approach in both the eTourism and manufacturing domain. In this paper, we introduce an approach that will enable communication, collaboration and value exchange of users through a multitude of online interaction possibilities based on the use of semantic technology. Finally, we also compare our approach with existing solutions with respect to the identified challenges in this subject.European Union (UE) EU FP7 284860 (MSEE