Abstract
Small and Medium scale Enterprises (SMEs) are called as the engine of the economy in developing countries such as Sri Lanka. Accordingly, SMEs are playing significant role in socio economic development of any country. In Sri Lanka, SMEs are contributed for the national GDP by 70% (Central Bank of Sri Lanka, 2013). Majority of SMEs are being engaged with local resources utilized business activities. SME creates a platform for locals to manufacture products and services using indigenous resources to get its optimum contribution for the nation. Majority of SME entrepreneurs are doing their own enterprises utilizing their own skills, knowledge, and expertise and so on. They are much creative enough in developing new product and service concepts in order to the market standards. How much standards they are following on, marketing their products and services is the main obstacle they have confronted. Due to poor market orientation practices followed by SMEs, still they cannot produce their maximum contribution to the economy. Having an intention on these obstacles confronted by SMEs, this study is designed to identify the key determinants affecting on market orientation by SMEs. Further this study attempted into identification of issues and barriers that are inhibited the producing market oriented products and services by SMEs. For the purpose of this field study researches have selected Matara District as their research site. Small and Medium scale entrepreneurs were the population for this study. Numbers of 50 SMEs have been randomly selected for the sample and a structured questionnaire was used to gather relevant primary data. Using factor analysis technique results were found. The results were discussed relating to four key areas; market based rewards systems, top management emphasis, inter-functional connectedness and management risk posture. Finally the study concluded that designing the cushion environment for SMEs is the responsibility of policy making bodies to get the maximum of SMEs within this challenging economic conditions and hostile competitive environment.
Highlights
The exploratory work conducted prior to this study work pointed to the importance of being dedicated towards customers, scholarly contributions on the marketorientation became very interesting
The market orientation scale developed in the current study provides such a means, and gives researchers a rigorous research procedure that may relive them from repeated efforts at construct and instrumentation development when it comes to the small and medium scale enterprises
The aim of this study was to investigate the key factors affecting on market orientation (MO) and to examine how the dimensions of these constructs are related with a small and medium scale ornamental fish famers
Summary
The exploratory work conducted prior to this study work pointed to the importance of being dedicated towards customers, scholarly contributions on the marketorientation became very interesting. As Kara et al (2005) explain, several research findings indicating key factors affecting market orientation highlights the significance of market orientation. Researchers examining the key factors affecting on market orientation have increasingly added innovation, and innovativeness as constructs to their research models (Slater and Narver 2000; Agrawal et al.2003), and the research findings indicate that such constructs provide new insight to the concept of market orientation. Complementing market orientation by entrepreneurship and innovation was the basic idea presented by Peter Drucker as early as in 1954. He defined a business purpose to create a customer, and stated that “because it is its purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two and only these two basic functions: marketing and innovation”
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