Innovation and Change Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words - 1

Innovation and Change - Assignment Example Analoui and Karami (2003, p. 25) defined SMEs as one that has only a small share of its concerned market and is managed in a personalized way by its owner or part-owner, but not through a medium of an elaborate management system. SMEs are not sufficiently large to get access to the capital market for publically issuing of securities.   Researchers used different constructs such as annual sales, number of employees, value added, value of assets, annual profits etc to define and explain SMEs. Out of these constructs, number of employees and annual sales are most often used to delimit the category of SMEs. For most researchers, a small to medium sized firm is one that employs no more than 250 persons and is having annual sales of not more than  £50 million (Analoui and Karami, 2003, p. 26).   According to OECD, SMEs are non-subsidiary and independent firms that employ less than a given number of people. The most frequent upper limit to categorize a SME is 250 employees (OECD, 2000 , p. 7). The Small Business Administration in the United States has fixed certain criteria to delimit the size of a SMEs. According to these criteria, SMEs are those that employ less than 500 people, although it may be as high as 1500 in some circumstances (Akcay and Soylemez, 2009, p. 215). Importance of SMEs to the economy  SMEs play significant role in the economy mainly because they represent a vast majority of all the firms in many economies in terms of absolute numbers. As Bhaird (2010, p. 2) noted, more than 99 percent of enterprises in the US.