Who? When? Why? - New Zealand SME Owner-Managers Assess Their Business Assistance Interactions'

Abstract

Globally the small and medium enterprise (SME) sectors of individual nations are growing in size and significance. As a consequence, the successful provision of business assistance has come to be viewed as imperative in terms of advancing the fortunes of the small business sector and in contributing to economic growth. As a result, there is a situation where both public and private providers are seeking to enhance the interactions they have with such firms. Whilst the benefits of such efforts should be self-evident in the long term, it is clear that currently the focus, in terms of enhancing business assistance for SMEs, is on investigating supply side issues (i.e. how can service provision be improved) rather than those that relate to demand (i.e. investigating the needs of SME owner-managers). As a result of such a focus, there is the potential for a mismatch between what is being provided and what is required by the people who actually own or manage the enterprises. This situation seems destined to be perpetuated unless research is undertaken that examines the business assistance realities of SME owner-managers to better understand those experiences from the perspective of their ability to use what is provided. In New Zealand, as in other parts of the world, there exists a dearth of such research and there is a subsequent gap in the knowledge base regarding SMEs and successful business assistance interactions from their perspective. The project this paper reports on is therefore an attempt to address such shortcomings. The paper presents the results of a project that examined the way in which 50 New Zealand firms interacted with the SME support infrastructure. Both the assistance interactions and their characteristics will be discussed, including the frequency of interaction, the particular assistance sources, and circumstances under which firms used the sources. Assessments, and subsequent rankings, of the usefulness and significance of these sources by SME owner-managers will also be presented. The nature of the paper is such that the results will be of interest to researchers, policymakers and assistance providers.