DOI: 10.5176/2251-2039_IE15.19
Authors: Katarzyna Łobacz, Paweł Głodek, Edward Stawasz and Piotr Niedzielski
Abstract: Despite considerable research work devoted to business advice, its participation in the development process of small innovative firms remains poorly recognized. Especially understanding of strategic importance of business advice and its impact on development and performance of small innovative firms is limited. Therefore authors conducted a series of Europewide case studies on which they base their description of the advice process taking place within small innovative firms. The paper presents an analysis of identified business advice, in which knowledge transfer seems to be long-standing, multidimensional and lead to unpredictable, often spectacular results of strategic importance. The process is called business advice utilization, as opposed to typically defined use of business advice, meaning the process in which advise is only one of the external knowledge resource, transferred directly from the advisor and used within operations, when problems are clearly defined. The analysis confirm that utilization of business advise plays a significant role in development of small innovative firms and their future performance. The results suggest that in contrast to typical use of business advice, the utilization process requires interaction at the strategic level and trust-based cooperation between entrepreneur and advisor in the strategic change context and is possible only if entrepreneur is open for advice and advisor’s attitude is very flexible. Those results provide a new framework for thinking about measurement of business advise in the development process of small innovative firms and open some new questions requiring answers.
Keywords: small innovative firms; business advice; utilization of business advice, business development process
Updating...