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The aim of this research is to contribute to the limited existing research on the subject of SME access to international procurement by analysing whether the dynamic capabilities of learning and knowledge management would allow SMEs to overcome the internal and external barriers of the international public procurement market. By means of CAQDAS software and in-depth interviews with management-level executives responsible for international procurement, the authors analysed the barriers faced by Spanish firms in the public procurement market, and studied the dynamic capabilities developed to overcome those barriers. Results show that SMEs develop dynamic learning and knowledge management skills and that these are embodied in knowledge acquisition and transformation capabilities. The authors provide SMEs with ideas not only about the learning and knowledge capabilities required in the international public procurement market, but also about the key barriers they may find. Moreover, suggestions for public administration are also provided. The value of the paper is twofold, on one hand, the paper tackles the problems of the market barriers in international public procurement from the perspective of how SMEs can overcome them. On the other, it is the first time that research integrates these two areas of analysis i.e. international public procurement and barriers overcome by dynamic capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Consistent with the diffusion of innovation (DOI) model and resource-based view (RBV) theory, the purpose of this paper is to develop a research model for measuring enterprise resource planning (ERP) post-adoption and its consequence on small and medium enterprise (SME) performance. Design/methodology/approach – The model links six determinants based on DOI to explain "ERP use" and three on RBV to explain the "ERP value", on which nine hypotheses are postulated. Testing was conducted through structural equation modelling, utilizing data from 558 web-surveyed firms in Portugal and Spain. Findings – Full sample analysis finds that competitive pressure, training, best-practices, compatibility, and efficiency are important antecedents of "ERP use". Together with usage, collaboration and analytics capabilities contribute to "ERP value". Cross-country analysis reveals that complexity is an important inhibitor for "ERP use" in Portuguese firms whereas it is a facilitator for Spanish firms. In addition, while for Portuguese firms, compatibility and efficiency are significant, they are not for Spanish firms. For "ERP value", while use and collaboration are more important for Portuguese firms, analytics is more important for Spanish. Research limitations/implications – The paper provides insight into how SMEs use and value ERP; however, the authors cannot speak empirically on the issue of whether value is sustained, or on maturity stages, or on the impact of different industries. Originality/value – The paper describes the first empirical research study on Iberian SMEs, thus adding a cross-country dimension to the innovation diffusion literature. Unlike the typical focus on ERP adoption found in the literature, this paper focuses on post-adoption stages, linking usage with value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper aims to shed light on the relationship between the entrepreneurial behaviour of small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) and their commitment to sustainable development (SD). In order to analyse the determinants of SD engagement at the organisational level, we draw on the resource‐based view of the firm and examine specifically the effects of entrepreneurial orientation and internationalisation, using survey data from Spanish and Mexican SMEs. Our results reveal that entrepreneurial orientation is positively associated with SD engagement, particularly regarding the environment, human resources, and community involvement. However, we could only observe a positive effect of SME internationalisation on SD engagement in Mexican but not in Spanish firms, suggesting that this effect is context‐dependent and related to institutional pressures. We discuss the implications of these findings for scholars and practitioners. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether collaborating with public research organizations (PROs) contributes to strengthening the innovation culture of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). We examine to what extent their innovation culture is reinforced by collaborations with research organizations and investigate the type of organizational strategies that enhance this effect of collaboration. The empirical study is based on a survey of firms that collaborate with the largest Spanish PRO, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Our results indicate that SMEs differ greatly in their capacity to strengthen their innovation culture through collaboration with research organizations. We show also that firms with formal innovation plans that develop internal and external search strategies are more likely to improve their innovation culture as a result of collaboration with PROs. These findings provide managers with new insights into how to strengthen their firms' innovation culture through collaboration with research organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trade literature has long discussed the existence of some benefits attributed to exporting, among others, the improvement of firm productivity. This paper examines whether firm size plays a role in this supposedly favourable relationship between exporting and total factor productivity (TFP). To examine this, we investigate, separately for large and small firms, whether firms starting to export perform better ex ante (self-selection) than non-exporting firms and, conditional on this fact, if they are also more productive ex post (learning-by-exporting). With this purpose, we use both stochastic dominance and matching techniques. The dataset is a representative sample of Spanish manufacturing firms drawn from the Encuesta sobre Estrategias Empresariales for 1990–2002. Our results shed light on the importance of considering differences in firm size when analysing both self-selection into exporting and post-entry productivity changes. They confirm the existence of a binding process of self-selection into exporting among small firms, but not among large firms. Post-entry productivity growth, although with different time patterns, is significant both for small and large firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the relevance in terms of policy, we still know little in Spain about where and by whom jobs are created, and how that is affecting the size distribution of firms. The main innovation of this paper is to use a rich database that overcomes the problems encountered by other firm-level studies to shed some light on the employment generation of small firms in Spain. We find that small firms contribute to employment disproportionately across all sectors of the economy although the difference between their employment and job creation share is largest in the manufacturing sector. The job creators in that sector are both new and established firms whereas only new small firms outperform their larger counterparts in the service sector. The large annual job creation of the small firm size class is shifting the firm size distribution towards the very small production units, although not uniformly across industries of different technology intensity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to test the individual effects of total quality management (TQM) on customer results, people results, society results and quality performance in a small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) context. The research is based on information from 85 ISO 9000 certified SMEs in Spain. A number of regression analyses are applied in order to examine the impact of TQM on these four results and identify which factors of TQM have the greatest effect. After analysing the survey data, 10 SMEs were randomly selected for individual visits, in order to check the results. The results show that TQM may improve customer results, people results, society results and quality performance. TQM factors related to training and specialist training are showed to be the most significant predictors of quality outcomes. The contribution of this paper is to study this association in SMEs in Spain. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses some of the empirical implications of the pecking order theory in the Spanish market using a panel data analysis of 1,566 firms over 1994–2000. The results show that the pecking order theory holds for most subsamples analyzed, particularly for the small and medium-sized enterprises and for the high-growth and highly leveraged companies. It is also shown that both the more and the less leveraged firms tend to converge towards more balanced capital structures. Finally, we observe that firms finance their funds flow deficits with long term debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the relation between working capital management and profitability for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by controlling for unobservable heterogeneity and possible endogeneity. Unlike previous studies, we examine a non-linear relation between these two variables. Our results show that there is a non-monotonic (concave) relationship between working capital level and firm profitability, which indicates that SMEs have an optimal working capital level that maximizes their profitability. In addition, a robustness check of our results confirms that firms' profitability decreases as they move away from their optimal level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a first-hand experience in Software Process Improvement within a Spanish Company which, since 2002, has been involved in an improvement programme led by our research group. We discuss the experience and the results of this improvement programme, as well as the lessons learned to deal with new future improvement initiatives in other companies of our environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main research questions in the field of strategic management is why firms obtain different performance levels. This paper answers this question from the strategic groups approach. This paper analyzes the linkage between strategic groups and firm performance offering a multilevel analysis about the relative importance of intergroup and intragroup performance differences based on the use of hierarchical linear models. The results show that intragroup differences explain firm performance better than intergroup differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finding funding is one of the main problems small and medium enterprises (SMEs) face, which is why the European Union has set up programmes to support SME development. This paper has two objectives: firstly, to describe the different European funding programmes available to Spanish firms; secondly, to present an empirical study on the use Spanish SMEs (and especially, SMEs in the service sector) make of these programmes in order to innovate, together with an analysis of the importance these funding programmes have on SME innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the relationship between the international experience of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and their economic performance using intangible and financial asset stock, competitive strategy, and international intensity as mediating factors. The RBV provides the theoretical framework to develop a theoretical model postulating that international experience has an indirect effect on foreign growth and economic performance. This model was used to test a sample of 394 Spanish SMEs through the modelization of a structural equations system. Results show that superior economic performance is only achieved by SMEs that can turn the knowledge they gain from international experience into a large endowment of internationally exploitable intangible assets (irrespective of the fact that these assets form the basis for strengthening international intensity) and into a differentiation competitive strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an intense debate in the literature on the impact of process management on innovation, and the division of opinions becomes particularly apparent with regard to radical innovation. Furthermore, organisational ambidexterity, the organisational capability to undertake incremental as well as radical innovation activities, has been underlined as a key source of competitiveness. In this article, we analyse how the cultural divergence driven by process management can affect organisational ambidexterity. Through a survey carried out on a sample of Spanish firms in the furniture and textile sectors, both of which have been drastically hit by competition from Asian firms, we conclude that the cultural context created by process management practices applied in a total quality management framework, which embraces exploitation along with exploration values, acts as a platform for developing organisational ambidexterity. Since organisational ambidexterity constitutes the capability of undertaking a rich variety of learning and innovation activities, these results could also have significant implications for practitioners, pointing to the need for close coordination between different functional areas in order to manage cultural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of the Internet has been spectacular, but only limited research has analysed how environmental and strategic variables simultaneously influence its organisational implementation and how small firms decide to adopt the use of the Internet. This study simultaneously examines the influence of three environmental dimensions (hostility, complexity and dynamism), and the three strategic dimensions (entrepreneurial, technological and administrative), upon the decision to introduce the use of the Internet into small business enterprises. We base our conclusions upon the data obtained from interviews with the managers of a sample of 94 small and medium-sized Spanish enterprises. Our results support a multidimensional view of environmental and strategic characteristics and show that all these variables constitute significant factors in deciding whether to introduce the Internet into company use. Logistic regression also shows the greater influence exerted by internal (strategic) factors and size rather than by environmental factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]