ABSTRACT:
The paper is a comparative
study of the entrepreneurial phenomenon in the eighties versus
entrepreneurialism in the post-millennial knowledge management era. For this
reason, it first concentrates on the historic evolution of the entrepreneurial
phenomenon of the eighties and then, by shifting away to more practical issues
on small business studies, the paper examines a number of personal,
sociological, and environmental factors that have influenced small businesses.
Ending the retrospective analysis of the eighties, the paper examines a number
of questions that were then considered as the reference points in small
business studies and juxtapose the influence they have had in the
post-millennium era.
Approaching the issue from a
knowledge management perspective, the paper investigates ways by which small
businesses can be assisted to adapt to today’s knowledge economy. It
takes a speculative look into questions like: “How should innovative
entrepreneurs use knowledge?”; “Should they be capable of using
knowledge management at strategic, tactical or operational level?” or
“Could knowledge management instruments per se assist them to acquire, develop and share knowledge?”
Upon answering these questions, the paper proposes a knowledge organisation
philosophy which may affect the way in which innovative small businesses work
in today’s global economy.
Keywords:
Entrepreneurship, Small-business, Comparison study, Past- and post-millennium
era, Knowledge management and organization
1. Introduction
Authors of the pre-1980s’
business management books tended to perceive entrepreneurs as the individuals
who create a new small business that flourishes and generates new employment. Under
their point of view, not only the eighties but every decade before or after the
eighties, could equally be labelled as entrepreneurial decades. The term
‘small business’, in this paper, is used in place of the phrase
‘small- to medium-sized enterprise’ (SME) introduced by the EU
administration.
In time, the view points
changed: To some, entrepreneurs are those who form new businesses that prosper
and create new employment, like Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs and
Steve Wozniak of Apple. Others also view as entrepreneurs corporate managers
who achieve outstanding success for their firms, like Harold Genin of IT&T and Lee Iacocca of Chrysler. Irrespectively
of the definition one may acknowledge, facts indicate that: In the USA economy,
21 million jobs were created in the 1980s, with a 94% of those generated by the
15% of young, entrepreneurial and rapidly growing companies; during the same
period, 3.5 million were eliminated by Fortune 500 companies (Birch, 1987). In
central and eastern Europe approximately 7 million entrepreneurs were striving,
during the 1990s, to transform the command economies of the post communist
nations into free markets and, recently, China has recognised the importance of
entrepreneurs by accepting them as members of the communist party.
In today’s economy ‘entrepreneurs
engage in any enterprise in the hope of creating wealth’ and they
‘contribute to our economic progress and well being by moving resources
from less to more valuable employments’; they are ‘willing to risk
their wealth and reputations to challenge the prevailing views of the possible,
and who, when they succeed, turn one generation’s fantasies into the next
generation’s necessities’ (Clark and Lee, 2006, p. 1). In a free
market economy environment, knowledge is the factor with which entrepreneurs
can distinguish themselves from their competitors. In the western –and
not only– knowledge economy, the increasing interest for individual
entrepreneurship has given birth to technological and scientific developments
that follow each other at a very fast pace. The evolution of knowledge and its
management has drastically changed the prism under which entrepreneurial
businesses are scrutinised in the post-millennium era.
2. Small Business Economics
We are focusing on small
businesses from the economic theory perspective under which entrepreneurs
obtain a sense of purpose and accomplishment, and are recognized as the persons
who perceive an opportunity and create an organisation to pursue it. The
economics of entrepreneurship are very important to the economic development
and social welfare of a country, as they affect the two major questions about
society: how a society creates new wealth and how this is distributed among its
members (Kirchhoff, 1994a). Upon answering these questions, distinguished
economists have acknowledged the role of entrepreneurship as a major mechanism
for ensuring the two economic transactions, above.
Under the neoclassical
perspective –many buyers and many sellers who interact so as to ensure
that supply equals demand– the entrepreneurs were practically deleted.
Neoclassical theory which does not take for granted the origin of ‘new
demand’ has always had its critics; many classical economists objected to
the absence of entrepreneurship from the neoclassical model. It was the
classical capitalism theory –owners of land, buildings, machinery and
capital can create profits for themselves– that spawned entrepreneurship
and gave to entrepreneurs a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Joseph Schumpeter,
the Austrian born economist, first saw innovation –the use of an
invention to create a new commercial product or service– as the driving
force for creating new demand for goods and services. According to Schumpeter,
entrepreneurs start their business with little personal assets and the ambition
to create wealth for themselves taking advantage of innovations that challenge
the established few suppliers who dominate the markets. He called this process
‘creative destruction’ because entrepreneurs create new wealth
through the process of destroying existing market structures (Schumpeter, 1951).
Finally, towards the end of
the twentieth century the vagueness around entrepreneurship was elucidated.
Since 1979, the year that David Birch, the MIT business demographer, published
results of an economic analysis demonstrating that ‘small firms dominate
job creation and economic growth in the United States’, entrepreneurs are
considered the creators of wealth through innovation; they are at the centre of
job and economic growth; they are believed to represent a mechanism of fair
wealth distribution that depends on innovation, hard work and risk taking.
3. Critical Factors
Very often we hear or read
the comment that success in starting a small business, entrepreneurial or not, is to a large extent a matter of luck. But that is not true.
Do we believe that becoming a good medical doctor, an engineer or an actor
–just to mention a few professions– is a matter of luck? The truth
is that there is no more luck in becoming a successful entrepreneur than in
becoming successful in anything else. To be successful in entrepreneurship, one
must be prepared.
Here is where the next
question arises: Is entrepreneurship a talent or a science that can be taught?
Although as recently as in the mid eighties many academics maintained that
entrepreneurship could not be taught, it needed less than ten years for it to
become a very fast-growing subject in the major business schools curricula. The
process of creating a new, innovative business is well understood and, thus, it
can be taught; early enough, even at the People’s University of Beijing,
courses on free enterprise and entrepreneurship were introduced (Bygrave, 1994).
Bygrave, to whom “the entrepreneurial process involves all the
functions, activities, and actions associated with perceiving opportunities and
creating organizations to pursue them” (1994, p. 2), recognizes a number of
personal, sociological, and environmental factors that are critical upon
establishing a new enterprise. While entrepreneurship has been studied
extensively, research findings have not been consistent regarding the
entrepreneurial personality. This may partly be due to the fact that different
types of entrepreneurs are revealed in the relevant literature. Miner (1997)
makes the distinction among four personality types of successful entrepreneurs:
the personal achiever, the real manager, the expert idea generator and the
emphatic salesperson; Reynolds et al –Bygrave
being one of them– (2003) differentiate between ‘opportunity’
and ‘necessity’ entrepreneurs. Whether or not a certain type of
entrepreneur will go ahead with his innovative idea and will create a new
business, very often depends on factors like family status, role models to
which he/she is exposed, alternative career options, the economical situation
and, last but not least, the availability of resources.
External, environmental
influences are considered as important as the personal attributes for a
would-be entrepreneur. Some distinct areas of the world are definitely more
entrepreneurial than others. The region of East Cambridge that is adjusted to
MIT was characterised as ‘The Most Entrepreneurial Place on Earth’
by Inc. magazine and the
Family businesses, of
course, existed long before the evolution of entrepreneurship and even before
the genesis of historians and economists. Wang et al (2007), who studied the financial
performance of small family businesses in the
Finally, there are some
sociological factors, connected with the entrepreneur’s age and family
responsibilities that play an important role in the decision of a would-be
entrepreneur to start a company. Career decisions are much easier for a person
in his mid twenties to take, than for somebody in his mid forties, with family,
children and the responsibilities that come along with them. Critical factors,
sociological or not, appear to be strongly influenced by the socio-economic
environment, in certain parts of the globe; Nair and Pandey
(2006), who surveyed 46 entrepreneurial firms in India, are listing the
religious community of the entrepreneurs, the economic status of their family,
their age and, only at the bottom of the list, education and training as the
most important factors that affect entrepreneurship.
3.1. Start-Up Capital And
Leadership
Raising the start-up
capital needed in order to get the business generate a positive cash flow, was
another critical question that needed to be answered by the entrepreneurs of
the eighties. Some striking examples, where young entrepreneurs started their
small business with very little start-up capital have been given special
attention: Olsen and Anderson started DEC with only 70,000
Leadership is another
behavioural attribute that largely differentiates the entrepreneur from the
non-entrepreneur. Although personnel selection and training have been
formalised for most of the routine aspects of managerial skills, based on
comprehensive job analyses, this is not the case for the leadership tasks of
the entrepreneurs. Human resource management researchers distinguish two roles
that an effective owner-manager of a small business should undertake. The charismatic role that is often split into
envisioning, empowering and energising and the architectural role involving the design of the organizational
structure and the setting of the appropriate control and reward systems (Kets de Vries and Balazs, 1999). Each one affects different functions of the
organization and, thus, they are critical for the success of the enterprise.
The entrepreneurs who manage to balance amid the above two roles and, at the
same time, possess a good mix of basic managerial skills have the best
credentials to success.
4. Small Business Problems
In an effort to better
understand the problems that small businesses and entrepreneurs faced during
the eighties and nineties we take a close look at certain questions that Murphy
(1996) considered as the reference points in small business studies in the
Can start-up be encouraged by a state enterprise policy?
According
to Murphy (1996), regional aid policies designed to encourage new businesses
have failed to attract dynamic, new technology, high productivity businesses
with export potential. He recognises, though, that the attempt to get people
off the dole or a stable job and force them to accept responsibility for their
own employment can be seen in governmental Enterprise Allowance Schemes.
Gatewood and Hylton (1994) portray
Small Business Administration (SBA, established by the USA Congress in 1953) as
the independent federal agency charged with aiding, counselling, assisting, and
protecting the interests of small businesses. SBA had 110 offices already in
1994 and covered every state supporting diverse activities with its development
programs like the
Looking
into the issue from a reverse angle, Clark and Lee (2006), emphasise on the
entrepreneurial freedom and the way it has been tolerated by the state. The
authors are very critical to governments ‘distorting market activities by
expanding beyond the minimal role necessary for maintaining a properly
functioning market order’ and urge them to find the ‘fragile
balance between ... the freedom and discipline upon which a market
depends’ (p. 13).
Is government support for small businesses sufficient?
The
nature of government support varies among countries and economies. For Murphy
(1996) the financial support provided by the
In
the USA, according to Gatewood and Hylton (1994), it appears that there is a wealth of external
assistance provided at Federal, state and local government levels, together
with some non-profit institutions; SBA and the university-supported Small
Business Institute (SBI) program being the most widely spread. White and
Reynolds (1996) maintain that one of the few ways in which governments might be
involved in the creation and support of new business is through the provision
of a variety of business assistance programmes, which may be either operated by
the public sector or just aided by government advertising. According to the
authors, these programmes have flourished in the
Co
(2004), after surveying 200 small and medium sized firms from different sectors
in Philippines, notices ‘significant differences in the views of
government support institutions and entrepreneurs as to whether the programmes
were responsive to the needs of the entrepreneur; whether they encouraged
entrepreneurship and helped in the success of a firm’ (p. 185). Based on
her study findings, the author proposes for the programmes to be periodically
reviewed, mainly from the perspective of its users who have to ensure that they
are tailor-made to their needs; otherwise the institutions offering them may
very well become self-righteous. In India,
support from financial institutions is in dismal state and this, according to Shukla (2004), is responsible for a considerably lower
growth rate noted in the country’s construction sector, as compared to
the ones of China, Brazil and Taiwan, all four rapidly developing countries.
The author notes the ‘need for governmental support through incentives
like a rational power tariff, regular electricity and water supply, rational
tax structure and financial system and infrastructure’ (p. 89); services
that are all taken for granted in every western economy.
Do small businesses generate significant employment opportunities?
For
Murphy (1996), whose study focuses on the
The
situation appears clearer in the
How are small businesses related to technology and technological
innovation?
The
contrasting and rather heterogeneous nature of small businesses is the main
reason for which Murphy (1996) is not giving a clear answer to the question. He
quotes plenty of evidence for the emergence of new technology firms in
computing and software applications, but he also gives examples of small
business sectors that are labour intensive.
Bygrave (1994), talking for the USA, states that
entrepreneurial firms are great innovators and big USA firms rely increasingly
on strategic partnerships with smaller entrepreneurial businesses in order to
get access to desirable R&D. He gives a number of examples that support his
statement.
Finally,
questioning Schumpeter’s (1942) rather old posture that innovation
capabilities increase proportionally with firm size, Roy and Sikdar (2003) propose an empirical research to ascertain ‘that
small enterprises have certain learning characteristics which enable them to
adopt new technologies faster than large enterprises’ (p. 183). The
authors appear quite sure about the confirmation of their hypothesis and they
believe –in compliance with Bygrave (1994),
above– that this ‘would venerate models on organising large enterprises
in the lines of small entrepreneurial firms so as to bring in flexibility,
learning ability and higher responsiveness’ (p. 196).
How important are the managerial skills of small businesses owners?
Murphy
(1996) recognises the need to improve the skills of small businesses
owner-managers, something that appears also to be of strong interest to
training organisations, consultants and academics. At the same time he admits
that the development of skills should have as a prerequisite an adequate
definition of what constitutes ‘managerial tasks’ for small
businesses owner-managers. And Coulson-Thomas (2000),
underlines that educators and trainers should define relevant competences and
take appropriate steps to equip would-be entrepreneurs with them.
For
Bygrave (1994), the ideal entrepreneur in the
In
central and eastern Europe, entrepreneurs who manage small and medium sized,
domestically owned private enterprises have to deal with the challenge of
internationalising their business operation within the changing business environment
of this transitional economy. Lloyd-Reason et al (2005), upon examining the
extent to which an infrastructure of formal and informal provision is
developing to match the above demand in four countries –Bulgaria, Czech
Republic, Hungary and Romania– have identified the lack of professionalism within the
business support infrastructure and poorly developed management skills among
the key functional areas of concern in the organisations interviewed.
What is the ideal balance between small and large enterprises in an
economy?
In
Western economies little attention has been given to the implications embedded
in the question of balance, while in the late eighties early nineties, the
former command-led economies of Central and
Do barriers to growth exist?
Murphy
(1996), based on a report published by the
Bureaucracy
is also recognised as a major barrier in
What kind of small businesses fail, why and at what point in their
life-time?
Murphy
(1996), who sees ‘failure’ as either voluntary or forced
liquidation, emphasises on why small businesses fail and whether or not trends
can be detected which will help managers to avoid failure. The author relates
small businesses mortality to barriers to entry and comes to two broad
conclusions: where barriers to entry are low then survival is low, and where
barriers to entry are high then there is a greater chance that a business will
survive. Storey (1994) identifies eleven factors which influence the
probability of business failure, with size and age at the two top positions. Gangulay (1985)
claims that almost 50 per cent of the firms fail in the first four years of
their life.
Kirchhoff
(1994a) who also analyses the term ‘failure’ in depth, states that
SBA administrators often use the alliteration that ‘four out of five
small firms fail in their first five years’ in the
Through
a survey among ninety British and forty-eight Indian entrepreneurial ventures, Manimala (2002) observes that ‘the consequences of a
new venture failing in West are not as serious as it is in
In the previous sections,
we have completed our retrospective analysis of the entrepreneurial phenomenon
of the eighties and have made certain projections into today’s state of
affairs. We have taken a close look at the economics of small businesses and
examined a variety of factors that are considered critical for their start-up.
Focusing on interesting previous research findings has helped us better
understand the problems they face. As we are now aiming to connect the above
raised entrepreneurial problems with knowledge and its management, we must
first define a certain number of ‘knowledge domains in which the
entrepreneur can target himself in particular’ Beijerse
(2000). In his study, Beijerse defines three such
domains: organisation, marketing and technology. Knowledge in the organisation
can be applied to all levels of management –strategic, tactical and
operational– policies, company culture, and human resources. Knowledge,
in the area of marketing, can be related to markets, competition, customers,
sales, distribution channels and target groups. Finally, technological
knowledge is closely associated with core competences, product research and
development, information and communication technologies. The importance of the
above knowledge domains for the would-be entrepreneur, is leading us to take a
closer look into the knowledge management issue in the following section.
5. Small Business In The Knowledge Economy
Knowledge management owes
its inspiration to the work of the philosopher Michael Polanyi and the Japanese
organization learning 'guru' Ikijuro
Nonaka. Both theorists argue that knowledge has two
forms: explicit and tacit, which bears some similarity to Thomas Stewart's hard
and soft knowledge assets and the perspective of von Krogh and Roos who assert that knowledge differs in many ways from
what they call traditional resources (i.e. financial, physical, organisational,
technological, intangible, and human). Explicit knowledge is the obvious
knowledge found in manuals, documentation, files and other accessible sources.
Tacit or implicit, knowledge is found in the heads of an organization's
employees. It is far more difficult to access and use, for obvious reasons.
Typically, a small business or an entrepreneurial organization does not even
know what this knowledge is.
There is no doubt that the world
economy, during the last two decades, has demonstrated unique characteristics
such as the critical role of information and communication technologies and the
extent of globalization. The new knowledge-based economy, which is inhabited by
knowledge-intensive firms employing knowledge workers, has its own economic
structures and rules although it does not fundamentally differ from the
industrial economy which preceded it. Grant (2000, pp. 29-30) juxtaposes a list
of characteristics of the new, knowledge-based, postindustrial economy that he
considers closely associated with the increasing interest in knowledge
management:
¨
The principal factor of production in the new global economy is
knowledge, as opposed to capital (industrial economy) and land (agrarian
economy).
¨
The primary assets of firms are intangible (like technology, patents and
brands) rather than tangibles (land, machines, and financial assets).
¨
It is digital, fully networked (through Intranets, Extranets and the
Internet), and thus virtual. Grant describes the ‘virtual’
organization as one “… that lacks either formal structure or
authority” (2000, p. 29).
¨
The new economy is fast moving (compressed product life cycles) and
better performing, in developed countries where the demand to appreciate the
benefits of the new economy is not stagnant.
The combined effect of these
characteristics has resulted to a number of structural changes within the
business sector that are affecting small businesses and entrepreneurial organizations. Dissolving the boundaries between firms and
markets, making gradually less clear the distinction between producers and
consumers and, last but not least, globalization are
among them. But, as Grant warns, by accumulating every significant change that
has occurred in the new economy and accrediting them all to the new knowledge
economy we run the risk of failing to analyze contemporary trends. And this
analysis is very important if we are to understand small business
entrepreneurship and plan its traces into the future.
Under Nonaka’s
perspective, any entrepreneurial small business that would like to be a
knowledge creating company needs to understand the nature of knowledge it seeks
or it possesses and the systems which are used to create, maintain, and
disseminate its organizational knowledge base. According to Freeman (1982), the
knowledge creation that has gained greater association with the entrepreneurial
firm is related either to ‘invention’ (the original
conceptualization of an idea, drawing or model) or to ‘innovation’
which is the first commercial application of an invention. The role of the
entrepreneur, as a leader, is to provide the conceptual framework that will
allow his employees to innovate by using the information and knowledge they
posses.
Innovation, by its nature,
destructs the equilibrium and causes uncertainty in today’s competitive
markets. In order to survive, small businesses have to innovate further and
although this competition driven innovation may keep large corporations alive, it
creates difficulties to small businesses (Cantner et
al, 2004). Despite that, recent research findings from different areas are
positive: Van Auken et al (2008), upon analysing the
relationship between the degree of innovation and performance among 1,091
Spanish SMEs, report that innovation positively
impacts SMEs performance in low and high technology
industries and that it is more important in achieving a competitive advantage for
high technology rather than low technology firms. MacAdam
et al (2008), who studied the innovation incorporation in SMEs
as a key sustainable source of competitive advantage among 2,086 SMEs in the
Entrepreneurial firms are destined
to innovate for yet another reason; it is the new skills and competences
developed along side with the innovative process that enables them to perform
fine and survive in the market (Cefis and Marsili, 2005). In the following section, we are taking a
close look at certain research findings that may shed light to our major
hypothesis: the extent to which knowledge management may assist small
businesses to be converted into knowledge organizations in the post-millennium era.
5.1. Recent Research Findings
Careful reading between the lines of
the main findings of certain rather recent researches will help us understand
how knowledge management and its tools are used by small, entrepreneurial
businesses in the past-
and post-millennium eras. The
first is an ongoing research project that has been contacted by the Centre of
Competitiveness at the
Research findings of Beijerse (2000) who paid special attention to the
relationship of knowledge management and small businesses are also very
interesting. Upon answering the question ‘How do innovative entrepreneurs
use knowledge’, through the analysis of the results of an extended survey
among twelve innovative companies from the Dutch industrial and business
service sectors, Beijerse concludes that: There have
been hardly any systematic knowledge management policy noted on strategic or
tactical level within the twelve small businesses studied. That means that
there were no goals included in the company strategy, not even any structure on
a tactical level related to knowledge development, acquisition, sharing or
evaluation. On the other hand, Beijerse reports that there
were an astonishing number of 79 different instruments used in order to
evaluate, develop, acquire and share knowledge on operational level among the
companies studied.
KPMG, in their 1998
Knowledge Management Research Report, notice that a surprising 42 per cent of
the 100 British companies questioned about the various knowledge management
aspects in their every day business management, admitted –at the end of
the survey– that ‘We already use knowledge management, only we do
not call it knowledge management’. Another remarkable finding from this
survey is that 14 per cent of the companies questioned had never heard of
knowledge management and only 2 per cent believed that knowledge management is
a trend that means very little.
Clusters of high-technology
firms are another means of sharing knowledge and have always been considered of
significant influence on the innovativeness of regional economies. Bhave (1994) reports that entrepreneurial firms gain access
to resources through networks and that by using these networks they gain
further access to additional sources that are combined in the start-up stage. Xingang Xu and McNaughton (2006),
upon examining the evolution of the Waterloo Region
Finally, Schultz (2008), in
a case study of a certain non-profit, nongovernmental organisation in the US
which the author identifies as ‘entrepreneurial on the one hand’,
notices two distinct cultures: one of central coordination and efficiency and
another of localised decision-making, involved in encouraging innovation and
entrepreneurship, while institutionalizing an organisation-wide knowledge
management initiative. The author concludes that, although this cultural mix
makes implementing knowledge management seem next to impossible, certain steps
towards this direction have been recognised: knowledge activists may help
facilitate explicit knowledge management on an insufficient budget; individual
staff members with adequate personal motivations may offer alternative points
of leverage to help institutionalize knowledge sharing and embed knowledge
management practices.
The foregone analysis of
the influences of today’s knowledge economy environment on small
entrepreneurial businesses and the above research review leads us to draw
useful conclusions in the section following.
6. Conclusions
In this paper we have
assessed a retrospective analysis of the entrepreneurial phenomenon of the
eighties and we have looked into its economics and the critical factors that
are essential for a would-be entrepreneur in the post-millennium knowledge
management era. We have demonstrated that entrepreneurship is not a matter of
luck, but a talent and a science that can be taught. This does not contradict Coulson-Thomas’ point of view that ‘some knowledge entrepreneurs are
instinctive or born; others possess specialist expertise, or know about
particular technologies’. After all, it is the same author who states
that ‘in fields or sectors in which know-how accounts for an increasing
proportion of the value being generated ... corporate culture, policies,
processes and practices should all be supportive of knowledge
entrepreneurship’ (2004,
p. 2). From the above research
review we may conclude that a significant part of the entrepreneurial and
innovative small businesses in Europe, the US, Canada, and certain developing
countries do use knowledge management in a way. Even if they do not use it at
strategic or tactical level, they make good use of knowledge management
instruments in order to develop, acquire, evaluate and share knowledge.
We are, at this point, juxtaposing
the important role of training or long-life education since we have demonstrated,
in sections three and five, that there is a lot for a small business owner to
learn in order to convert his/her entrepreneurial small business into a
successful knowledge organization. A knowledge organization or a small business
managed by a knowledge entrepreneur in the post-millennium era,
needs to:
¨
Recognise the multilateral nature of knowledge
and use appropriate job-support tools to capitalise on its knowledge resources
in pursuit of its vision.
¨
Develop key competences such as the ability to collaborate with others,
learn how to manage systems appropriate to store and disseminate knowledge, in
a way that creates and delivers greater value.
¨
Exceed the traditional limits of knowledge management using all possible
combinations of emerging technologies to network people and organisations in a
way that communication and sharing of knowledge will increase organisational
performance.
Under this perspective, entrepreneurs,
who in the early eighties were identified as the individuals who create a new
small business that flourishes, may, in the post-millennial knowledge
management era, be seen as the engine of a nation’s economic and social growth.
Entrepreneurial knowledge organisations are now acknowledged as the mechanism
by which new products and services enter the market and create growth, in a way
that allows economists to state that the more entrepreneurship an economy produces, the better are its chances of remaining
competitive in today’s knowledge economy. Especially in the in the
post-millennium arena of a borderless world of finance, technology and
knowledge transfer that grant to small businesses access to everything that in
the past only big businesses could own.
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Meet the Author:
Associate Professor Haris Papoutsakis
is an academic faculty member in the
Haris Papoutsakis,
Electrical Engineering Department, School of Applied Technology, Technological Education Institute
(TEI) of Crete, P.O. Box 1939, GR-71004 Heraklion,
Crete, Greece; e-mail: harispap@career.teicrete.gr
Contact Address: