Engaging SMEs in Cooperation and New Forms of Learning

Abstract

Globalization has strong if contradictory impacts on SMEs. The sharp increase of worldwide competition in recent decades weakened SMEs right across the board. At the same time, globalization offers many new opportunities and the importance of SMEs has increased. Opportunties include the potential to act as collaborators in multi-enterprise consortia, for international clients and partners. Their importance has increased because of their specific potential, such as high specialization and the ability to react faster than big enterprises. Therefore, it is important for such companies to take up the challenge to operate on a global scale. To be able to play this role, SMEs have to tackle change and develop their learning processes on a far-reaching scale. If the triangle and interplay of continuous learning, knowledge management and new technologies, is key in making or breaking companies as well as national and supranational entities (such as the EU), it is important new means of addressing these areas, particularly through the use of ICT are explored. While ICT and especially web 2.0 applications -social networks, blogging, web repositories and shared resources, modern learning platformshave great potential to support and enable SMEs in their drive towards competitiveness, the realization of this potential is by no means automatic. Success depends on a strategic approach, technical skills and facilities. This paper takes a closer look at the situation of European SMEs and presents findings from recent European projects identifying the ongoing problems in the adoption of new forms of learning. Secondly the paper discusses learning approaches and web-based technologies particularly suitable for SMEs.

Linking Transformational Leadership, Absorptive Capacity, and Corporate Entrepreneurship

“…The nexus between leadership and corporate entrepreneurship is an interesting relationship worthy of investigation due to leadership's undeniable importance to promote corporate entrepreneurship. The dynamic environment, which necessitates the role of corporate entrepreneurship, has led to new strategic imperatives that aim to rethink leadership (Morrisette and Oberman 2013); notably, transformational leadership has been shown to enhance entrepreneurial activities (Ling et al 2008;Yang 2008), especially where SMEs are an impetus to the future and the sustainability of big firms (Hamburg et al 2013). As postulated, leadership is one of the key factors behind the successes and failures of SMEs (Quan 2015).…”

Open courses and MOOCs as professional development – is the openness a hindrance?

“…Higher demands on the competence and skills among personnel and workforce require increased professional development (Hamburg et al, 2013;Milligan and Littlejohn, 2014;Noe et al, 2014). It is also increasingly important to link experience with academic knowledge through collaboration between industry and academia (Andersen et al, 2013).…”

“…There is also a range of differently designed courses that more or less can be described by the MOOC concept. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that it is mainly large companies that are active in cooperation with the providers of the platforms (de Vries, 2013), although several articles describe the MOOCs as being highly relevant also for SMEs (Hamburg et al, 2013;NOU, 2014).…”

PBL - Problem Based Learning for Companies and Clusters

“…as an excellent method of training for SMEs. It allows the learner to develop skills relevant to the needs of the company, it is conducted in a work based environment, it provides them with the skills to sustain the company beyond the initial training, it is low cost and it directly solves problems for the SME providing an immediate return [11]. Donnelly [12] highlighted that little is known about the use of technology in PBL.…”

“…web-based ones) [12]. Within blended learning, classroom based learning is combined with computer-mediated instructions [10], [11], but also various event-based activities (face-to-face class rooms, live e-Learning, selfpaced learning) are combined.…”