Hasil untuk "Small and medium-sized businesses, artisans, handicrafts, trades"

Ahmed Raza Amir, Syed Muhammad Atif

Workflow automation has become increasingly accessible through low-code platforms, enabling small organizations and individuals to improve operational efficiency without extensive software development expertise. This study evaluates the performance impact of workflow automation using n8n through a small-scale business case study. A representative lead-processing workflow was implemented to automatically store data, send email confirmations, and generate real-time notifications. Experimental benchmarking was conducted by comparing 20 manual executions with 25 automated executions under controlled conditions. The results demonstrate a significant reduction in the average execution time from 185.35 seconds (manual) to 1.23 seconds (automated), corresponding to an approximately 151 times reduction in execution time. Additionally, manual execution exhibited an error rate of 5%, while automated execution achieved zero observed errors. The findings highlight the effectiveness of low-code automation in improving efficiency, reliability, and operational consistency for small-scale workflows.

David Mena-Siles, German Gemar

This study investigates the determinants of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) survival through a quantitative analysis of financial and managerial factors. Using a dataset of SMEs observed over a ten-year period, the research applies survival analysis techniques based on the nonparametric Kaplan–Meier estimator and complementary log–log regression to identify predictors of business insolvency. The results show that firm survival is positively influenced by financial structure, return on assets, EBITDA, and human capital productivity, whereas excessive working capital is negatively associated with longevity. By incorporating underexplored variables such as financial results and employee productivity, this study broadens the empirical scope of survival analysis beyond traditional financial ratios. The findings contribute to the strategic management literature by identifying measurable financial and operational indicators that can serve as early warning signals of business failure. Although the data are drawn from a regional sample, the managerial implications are broadly applicable to SMEs operating across diverse economic and institutional contexts.

Leon A. Abdillah, Aisyah, Wahdyta Putri Panggabean et al.

This article examines the knowledge of digital transformation of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that specialize in traditional handicrafts, with a specific emphasis on the Songket textile sector. The study investigates the use of digital technologies, notably blog platforms and the e-commerce site Shopee, to improve and streamline several business processes in Songket textile SMEs. The report takes a case study approach, diving into the experiences of Songket clothing enterprises that have undergone digital transformation. Key areas studied include the use of Blog platforms for brand development, marketing, and consumer involvement, as well as the Shopee E-Commerce platform for online sales and order processing. The essay seeks to give insights into the problems and possibilities faced by Songket cloth SMEs along their digital transformation journey by conducting in-depth observation, interviews, and surveys. The findings add to the scholarly discussion on the digitization of traditional industries, with practical implications for SMEs in the Songket textile sector and other handicraft areas. This study emphasizes the necessity of using digital technologies to preserve and expand traditional crafts, while also throwing light on the potential role of prominent E-Commerce platforms like Shopee in facilitating worldwide market access for such firms.

Siddhartha Krothapalli, Kartikey Singh Bhandari, Tridib Kumar Das et al.

As customer feedback becomes increasingly central to strategic growth, the ability to derive actionable insights from unstructured reviews is essential. While traditional AI-driven systems excel at predicting user preferences, far less work has focused on transforming customer reviews into prescriptive, business-facing recommendations. This paper introduces ReviewSense, a novel prescriptive decision support framework that leverages advanced large language models (LLMs) to transform customer reviews into targeted, actionable business recommendations. By identifying key trends, recurring issues, and specific concerns within customer sentiments, ReviewSense extends beyond preference-based systems to provide businesses with deeper insights for sustaining growth and enhancing customer loyalty. The novelty of this work lies in integrating clustering, LLM adaptation, and expert-driven evaluation into a unified, business-facing pipeline. Preliminary manual evaluations indicate strong alignment between the model's recommendations and business objectives, highlighting its potential for driving data-informed decision-making. This framework offers a new perspective on AI-driven sentiment analysis, demonstrating its value in refining business strategies and maximizing the impact of customer feedback.

Lamia Ben Hamida

This paper aims to examine how local firms can learn from the export activities of large multinational corporations (MNCs). Arguing that MNCs’ export activities could act as catalysts for local firms, allowing them to start exporting or intensify their export volume, we hypothesize that the size and extent of export spillovers depend on the linkage between local firms and MNCs, the geographical distance between them in the home country, and the foreign export market destination in terms of psychic distance from the home market. Using Swiss manufacturing firm-level data, we found support to this learning by exporting effect through which local firms benefit from the presence of MNCs’ exporter counterparts and the export activities of their upstream MNCs’ suppliers, with particular effects of the nature and the physical location of destinations. From these findings, several important academic and practical implications are exhibited and discussed

Nastaran Simarasl, Pooya Tabesh, Younggeun Lee

Purpose – This research aims to theorize how a critical factor, resource access, can paradoxically impact the comprehensiveness of venture location decision processes and the relationship between decision comprehensiveness and new venture performance. To do so, the authors focus on nascent entrepreneurs’ venture location decision processes and introduce resource access as a double-edged sword. Design/methodology/approach – In this conceptual article, the authors draw from the strategic decision-making and resource mobilization literature to theorize about the new venture location decision-making process and its performance implications. Findings – By uncovering the paradox of resource access, the authors propose that high levels of resource access create a paradoxical situation in which nascent entrepreneurs are less likely to use comprehensive decision processes when their benefits are at their greatest. Originality/value – This work contributes to entrepreneurship research on new venture location and resource mobilization in three important ways. First, the authors advance the literature on nascent entrepreneurs’ location decision-making processes by introducing “location decision comprehensiveness” as a decision process construct and juxtaposing it with resource access to uncover the entrepreneurial decision-making process. Second, the authors develop a more nuanced theorization of the location choices made by nascent entrepreneurs instead of relying on generalized conclusions drawn from well-established corporations’ location decisions. Last, the authors extend the literature on resource mobilization in entrepreneurship by shedding light on the paradoxical aspect of resource access. While previous research has emphasized the favorable effects of resource access on new venture processes and outcomes, the authors contend that it can also negatively impact entrepreneurs’ ability to make effective decisions.

Jože P. Damijan, Sandra Damijan, Osiris Jorge Parcero

This paper examines whether there is a premium in country size. We study whether there are significant gains from being a small or a large country in terms of certain socioeconomic indicators and how large this premium is. Using panel data for 200 countries over 50 years, we estimate premia for various sizes of nations across a variety of key economic and socioeconomic performance indicators. We find that smaller countries are richer, have larger governments, and are more prudent in terms of fiscal policies than larger ones. On the other hand, smaller countries seem to be subject to higher absolute and per capita costs for the provision of essential public goods, which may lower their socioeconomic performance in terms of health and education. In terms of economic performance, small countries seem to do better than large countries, compensating for smallness by relying on foreign trade and foreign direct investment. The latter comes at the cost of higher vulnerability to external shocks, resulting in higher volatility of growth rates. This paper's findings offer essential guidance to policymakers, international organizations, and business researchers, especially those assessing a country's economic or socioeconomic performance or potential. The study implies that comparisons with medium-sized or large countries may be of little utility in predicting the performance of small countries.

Pedro I. Hancevic, Hector H. Sandoval

Maryam Khosravi, Mojtaba Amiri, Nezameddin Faghih

Purpose – Transitional entrepreneurship in distressed economies is a fairly new concept with respect to new ventures in such challenging economic environments. Formal institutional voids are sometimes held up as a reason for the difficulties present in distressed economies, along with exogenous shocks and other upheavals. In this research, the authors seek to contribute empirically and theoretically as to ways in which formal institutions voids can be filled by a culture developed by transitional entrepreneurs. Indeed, in transition economies, formal institutions need to be enhanced by informal institutions to control corruption and other misbehavior by authorities. Iranian economists emphasize these essential reforms to be able to manage current difficulties, yet top down policies cannot help transitional entrepreneurs benefit from the country’s value-adding cultural heritage to informally address this. To study this, qualitative research methods were used to interpret transitional entrepreneurs’ ideology and ethical routines as the ingredients of a commercial culture that can establish soft law that substitutes for formal institutions. This helps to reduce the disfunctionality of formal institutions in distressed economies. Design/methodology/approach – A thematic analysis interviewing key Iranian entrepreneurs and economists is conducted. Also based on an interpretive paradigm, a hermeneutic cycle has been carried out on selected texts. Results have been verified throughout related literature as to come up with a solid synthesized interpreted outcome. Findings – This paper contributes to theory from a new perspective by discussing transitional entrepreneurship and navigating a distressed economy; in which, ideology and ethics as the ingredients of soft law (Newman and Posner, 2018) are discussed as the base to further develop a commercial culture that fills voids of formal institutions. The formal–informal institutional cycle in distressed economies as the major difficulty entrepreneurs face (Peng and Luo, 2000) is important, because they try to increasingly enhance their move toward a market orientation (Bruton et al., 2008). The authors contribute as to how transitional entrepreneurs can complete this process of adaptation and also the fact that those informal institutions do actually respond to those adaptations. The other contribution is to enrich theories about institutions from the point of view of culture. Knowing these facts helps transitional entrepreneurs, because in distressed communities, formal institutions’ function has an important effect on economic performance (Amorós, 2009). This research’s contributions shed light to help government leaders understand the pros and cons of their actions forced on the industry. As it has been characterized in this research, it can turn in to new formal set of legitimacies (Ahlstrom et al., 2008) to root out corruption and help set the economy on a path to innovation and new venture creation. Originality/value – Transitional entrepreneurs can depend on the less formal cultural-cognitive aspect of ethics and ideology. These entrepreneurs can be working on the burgeoning private sector, who want to connect with the outside effectively to overcome an economy in distress. Transitional entrepreneurs may face governmental institutional intermediaries as a barrier. Formal intermediaries tend to benefit from inefficiencies caused by hierarchal orders and will improve informality in order to overcome difficulties. In this research, institutional theory from the third pillar of the cultural-cognitive sheds light on transitional entrepreneurship in distressed economies, where inquiry is to fill voids of formal institutions as a process of possible linking between new generated soft law derived by beliefs, ideology and professional morality in order to influence (old) legitimacies. The research’s focus evolves on values transitional entrepreneurs utilize to build informal institutions and then impact further on formal institutions to handle distressed communities. This theoretical background expands on subsections to define conceptual building blocks for the study, essential aspects such as individuals as transitional entrepreneurs, the values they utilize to generate soft law, informal institutions and soft law, to manage voids in formal institutions and legitimacy building aspects in policy agenda setting for transitional entrepreneurship in distressed economies.

Javier J. Hernández Acosta

This research analyses Maniobra, a cultural employment initiative that offers guaranteed income and additional support for three years to selected artists in Puerto Rico. Maniobra’s program design phase and preliminary first year results are analyzed through the author’s personal experience with the project as an arts entrepreneur and scholar. This reflection suggests how to address barriers facing artist initiatives with a lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion. A conceptual framework analyzes the preliminary impacts through a combination of artistic, personal, and economic well-being. The article also highlights the importance of institutional trust in artists and artistic work, expanding traditional philanthropy models.

Helen Zhou, Sercan O. Arik, Jingtao Wang

Time-series forecasts play a critical role in business planning. However, forecasters typically optimize objectives that are agnostic to downstream business goals and thus can produce forecasts misaligned with business preferences. In this work, we demonstrate that optimization of conventional forecasting metrics can often lead to sub-optimal downstream business performance. Focusing on the inventory management setting, we derive an efficient procedure for computing and optimizing proxies of common downstream business metrics in an end-to-end differentiable manner. We explore a wide range of plausible cost trade-off scenarios, and empirically demonstrate that end-to-end optimization often outperforms optimization of standard business-agnostic forecasting metrics (by up to 45.7% for a simple scaling model, and up to 54.0% for an LSTM encoder-decoder model). Finally, we discuss how our findings could benefit other business contexts.

K. A. Vlasenko

A significant role in the economic development of the country is given to the sector of small and medium-sized enterprises. In times of crisis its comprehensive support is one of the priority tasks of the government. In this connection the investigated business sector is under the close attention of country’s government and economists. The article analyzes the official statistical data on the main indicators of SME activity. It reveals a high correlation between the gross value added created by SMEs and the volume of innovative goods, works and services in the Russian Federation.

Chao Pan, Ryan Gabrys, Xujun Liu et al.

Trades, introduced by Hedayat, are two sets of blocks of elements which may be exchanged (traded) without altering the counts of certain subcollections of elements within their constituent blocks. They are of importance in applications where certain combinations of elements dynamically become prohibited from being placed in the same group of elements, since in this case one can trade the offending blocks with allowed ones. This is particularly the case in distributed storage systems, where due to privacy and other constraints, data of some groups of users cannot be stored together on the same server. We introduce a new class of balanced trades, important for access balancing of servers, and perturbation resilient balanced trades, important for studying the stability of server access frequencies with respect to changes in data popularity. The constructions and bounds on our new trade schemes rely on specialized selections of defining sets in minimal trades and number-theoretic analyses.

R. K. Yelshibayev

The article analyzes the current state of small and medium-sized businesses in the Republic of Kazakhstan. The author reveals the essence of business through the prism of public administration and defines its role in the economy of Kazakhstan. As a result of the study, the features and systemic problems in the functioning of small and mediumsized businesses in the Republic of Kazakhstan were studied. When analyzing the current state and development of SMEs in the Republic, the method of collecting information and, in part, the method of abstraction were used for effective search, grouping, processing and generalization of the necessary material. The study of the economic dynamics of indicators by means of a comparative method to establish cause –and-effect relationships and identify systemic problems of state regulation and development of small business. Through the application of appropriate general and private economic methods, promising directions for further development of small and medium-sized businesses in the Republic of Kazakhstan were developed, which include: improving the strategy and tactics of interaction between representatives of SME and the authorities; improving legislation (tax, financial and innovation) in the field of SME support; improving mechanisms that ensure access to financial resources for SME; creation of Centers financed by state for the training specialized personnel and intensification of the development of modern forms of business integration.

Dominic Athanassiou, George Musgrave

This paper explores how cultural entrepreneurs built a ‘heavy metal world’ in the Polish People’s Republic (PRL), focussing on the years 1980-89. By combining historical analysis with primary research to examine how both fans and artists alike acted together to overcome shortages, scarcity and repression, this paper supports definitions of cultural entrepreneurship which go beyond an economic orientation, and acts as case study to highlight the often uneasy co-existence between states and cultural production.

Qinghai Cui, Jiawei Peng, Chao Xu et al.

We develop a broadly-applicable computational method for the automatic exploration of the bimolecular multi-reaction mechanism. The current methodology mainly involves the high-energy Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics (BOMD) simulation and the successive reaction pathway construction. Several computational tricks are introduced, which include the selection of the reactive regions based on the electronic-structure calculations and the employment of the virtual collision-dynamics simulations with monitoring atomic distance before BOMD. These prescreening steps largely reduce the number of trajectories in the BOMD simulations and significantly save computational cost. The hidden Markov model combined with modified atomic connectivity matrix is taken for the detection of reaction events in each BOMD trajectory. Starting from several geometries close to reaction events, the further intermediate optimization and transition-state searches are conducted. The proposed method allows us to build the complicated multi-reaction mechanism of medium-sized bimolecular systems automatically. Here we examine the feasibility and efficiency of the current method by its performance in searching the mechanisms of two prototype reactions in environmental science, which are the penicillin G anion + H2O and the penicillin G anion + OH radical reactions. The result indicates that the proposed theoretical method is a powerful protocol for the automatic searching of the bimolecular reaction mechanisms for medium-sized compounds.

Karen Kim

Many states’ sales and use tax provisions, updated in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., will likely impose a disproportionate tax compliance burden on small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that engage in e-commerce. Relative to large companies like Amazon and eBay, SMBs cannot absorb the high compliance costs associated with tracking, collecting, and remitting taxes. Wayfair expanded states’ authority to collect sales taxes on companies without a physical presence in the state. But states should wield this power judiciously. While mimicking South Dakota’s statute (upheld as constitutional in Wayfair) may help states avoid litigation, they would better promote the goals of fairness and efficiency by exempting a larger category of small vendors from sales tax obligations. In light of the COVID‑19 pandemic, which has acutely hurt SMBs, reducing sales tax-related compliance burden would also help states provide relief to struggling SMBs. States should (1) clarify which entities are subject to the remote seller and marketplace facilitator statutes and (2) raise the de minimis safe harbor thresholds that shield smaller businesses from having to remit taxes.

Rustam Tagiew

The target of this paper is to present an industry-ready prototype software for general game playing. This software can also be used as the central element for experimental economics research, interfacing of game-theoretic libraries, AI-driven software testing, algorithmic trade, human behavior mining and simulation of (strategic) interactions. The software is based on a domain-specific language for electronic business to business negotiations -- SIDL3.0. The paper also contains many examples to prove the power of this language.

Jeffrey Muldoon, Carol Lucy, Sheryl Lidzy

Purpose – Understanding the factors that influence entrepreneurs throughout the entrepreneurial process has been a vital topic of entrepreneurial research. Despite societal changes, male entrepreneurs still outnumber females. The purpose of this paper is to develop a greater grasp on the factors that contribute to this phenomenon. Design/methodology/approach – Utilizing social dominance theory and social cognition theory, the authors suggest that a female entrepreneur’s social dominance orientation (SDO) and mentorship experiences will influence her social and conventional entrepreneurial intention. Findings – The authors’ theorizing suggests SDO can lower entrepreneurial self-efficacy which in turn can lower conventional entrepreneurial intentions but increase social intentions in some women. However, if the entrepreneur has mentoring, the effect could be dissipated. Originality/value – This paper is one of the first to examine the impact of SDO on entrepreneurial intentions, and builds on the work of other scholars.

Jason C. White

Arguably, both success and failure in arts entrepreneurship do not depend upon one’s own ability to employ themselves or create a business. Given that the academic field of arts entrepreneurship is still emerging, it is not surprising that arts entrepreneurship theory is underdeveloped. While a theory of arts entrepreneurship could help answer the recurring question (i.e., What is arts entrepreneurship?), without a theory supported by evidence, what arts entrepreneurship “is” may be based on individual subjectivity, discipline-based bias, and untested assumptions. To address this gap in the arts entrepreneurship literature, I propose a theory of arts entrepreneurship evidenced by repeated observations that are verifiable via case study experiences.