Which SMEs seek external support? Business characteristics, management behaviour and external influences in a contingency approach

To improve SME growth and competitiveness, governments often encourage business owner-managers to make use of external sources of support. Whether they seek this depends on the degree to which they perceive themselves to need assistance. Additionally its use can be constrained by market failures. In this paper, we model whether SME owner-managers seek information and advice from formal sources, including public and private providers. In 2011, the researchers conducted a telephone survey of 1202 SMEs (1-249 employees) in England to assess the use and non-use of external support between 2008 and 2011. Using a contingency approach, we model various influences on the use and non-use of formal support and identify those owner-managers who face more concerns but have less confidence in their capabilities. We find the demand for support, especially from private providers, is fuelled by a firm’s objective to grow and a size threshold, although this is moderated by various concerns which increase the likelihood of using public sources. The willingness to take informal advice can act as a stepping stone to using formal sources. Whilst market failures affected less than a fifth of firms, those with women directors were particularly affected as were newly founded firms

Knowledge networks in high-tech clusters: a multilevel perspective on interpersonal and inter-organizational collaboration

This study contributes to research on knowledge networks in high-tech clusters by adding a multilevel perspective. We show that while informal individual-level and formal organizational-level knowledge networks created by nested actors partly follow their own structural logic, they are at the same time logically intertwined. Interpersonal knowledge ties influence the maintenance of formal R&D collaborations and vice versa. To fully understand knowledge exchange in high-tech clusters it is therefore necessary to take a multilevel network perspective. Our study shows how these organizational-level and individual-level knowledge networks are mutually influential. Focusing on knowledge networks emerging in the context of regional clusters, we highlight how R&D collaborations among organizations impact the interpersonal exchange of knowledge among managers and researchers and vice versa. Taking a multilevel network perspective, we extend the existing understanding of knowledge networks by demonstrating that individuals who are willing to share their knowledge with colleagues belong to organizations involved in many R&D collaborations. These managers and their organizations thus benefit from each others’ central positions in the networks by having access to extensive sources of external knowledge. However, the opposite holds true when managers and researchers informally ask for knowledge from many of their colleagues. Our results show that extensive knowledge-seekers belong to organizations with fewer formal R&D collaborations. This can either be a sign of them trying to compensate for the lack of organizational-level collaborations or that they are harming their organizations’ chances to find collaboration partners. Finally, if two organizations collaborate on a joint R&D project there is a good chance that their managers and researchers also informally exchange knowledge with each other. Formal and informal knowledge networks thus overlap and open up the potential to realize synergies. We draw conclusions about whether individuals acquire knowledge independent of the opportunity structures provided by their organizations and thus fully exploit the possibilities provided by clusters