Sustainability as a Small Business Competitive Strategy

In our global village, sustainability has been an important topic for all countries, and small businesses can create a competitive advantage through developing sustainability strategies. This conceptual article extends the current literature by presenting the case for small businesses to become integrated in the surrounding community and to make sustainability a strategic long-term competitive advantage and a critical co-producer of its long-term success. Implications and the need for further research are discussed

Sustainability as a Small Business Competitive Strategy

In our global village, sustainability has been an important topic for all countries, and small businesses can create a competitive advantage through developing sustainability strategies. This conceptual article extends the current literature by presenting the case for small businesses to become integrated in the surrounding community and to make sustainability a strategic long-term competitive advantage and a critical co-producer of its long-term success. Implications and the need for further research are discussed

Improving Small Business Viability Through the Strategic Longevity and Health Maintenance Evaluation

Most adults are urged to go through an annual health checkup. We recommend that most mature small businesses perform an annual strategic longevity and health maintenance evaluation as well to ensure their viability. To this end, we provide strategic areas of critical importance to a small business viability and longevity and offer guidelines for small business owners, managers, consultants, and small business/entrepreneurship educators use to help improve performance. We add to the body of literature on small business success and failure factors by emphasizing the need for a closer look at the open systems nature of these businesses and the impact of interaction with the larger external environmental system for viability. We urge small business owners to be more proactive in evaluating the health and viability of their businesses by using systems approach before the emergence of signs of trouble through the use of the Annual Health Maintenance and Viability Evaluation checklist. We recommend the use of the checkup for use by consultants including SBI student consulting projects

Further extensions to rectangular dielectric waveguide technique for dielectric measurements

This paper describes a method to obtain the dielectric constant of materials using the rectangular dielectric waveguide technique in the WR-22 frequency band. By applying the solution of the wave equation, the actual dielectric constant for samples of small transverse dimensions can be directly recovered from the measured effective dielectric constant by a numerical technique. The method is very quick and simple and provides sufficient accuracy for most practical purpose