Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often have difficulty competing in the global economy unless they collaborate with domestic or foreign partners or with public sector organizations. This book addresses the resource leverage and innovation challenges that increased global trade represents for SMEs. In doing so, it explores how SMEs can become more competitive at home and in foreign markets as stand-alone firms or as members of supplier and customer networks. SMEs are turning increasingly to innovation as a source of competitive advantage in order to protect their home markets and participate in expanding foreign markets. The contributors to this volume - leading experts in entrepreneurship, innovation, and international business - provide in-depth coverage of the most compelling issues facing SMEs. These include: innovation as a competitive strategy, network dynamics, ways to leverage technology, internationalization, and the role of the public sector in helping SMEs to overcome resource deficiencies. This comprehensive look at SMEs in the global marketplace will be of great interest to academics who study entrepreneurship, innovation, or international business, officials from public sector agencies with responsibility for helping SMEs to internationalize and become more innovative, and senior executives of SMEs or executives of larger companies who are considering collaboration with SMEs.

With more emphasis being placed on the cost and quality of new products and on reducing the lead time to develop them, attention is turning to the increasingly important topic of design for manufacturability (DFM). This involves the collaboration among research and development, manufacturing, and other company functions and is aimed at accelerating the new product development process from product conception to market introduction. A company can create a competitive advantage for itself by managing the process and its related organizational dynamics effectively. This book includes chapters by experts who focus on the development of strategic capabilities, such as the systematic development and introduction of new technologies into products and processes, as well as the use of appropriate tools and techniques to facilitate communication and problem-solving between design and manufacturing. Other topics covered include learning from experience; the social, political, and cultural contexts within which key players interact; and the degree to which management of information and development of an effective structure are critical to new product development success. The information-intensive nature of the product development process is demonstrated throughout the book. The final chapter contains a model that links the role of information in the development of products to a company's capability to organize, process, and learn from that information.