The Dutch greenhouse horticultural industry is characterized by world leadership in high-tech innovation. The dynamics of this playing field are innovation in production systems and automation, reduction in energy consumption and sharing limited space. However, international competitive advantage of the industry is under pressure and sustainable growth of individual enterprises is no longer a certainty. The sector's ambition is to innovate better and grow faster than the competition in the rest of the world. Realizing this ambition requires strengthening the knowledge base, stimulating entrepreneurship, innovation (not just technological, but especially business process innovation). It also requires educating and professionalizing people. However, knowledge transfer in this industry is often fragmented and innovation through collaboration takes up a mere 25-30% of the opportunities. The greenhouse horticulture sector is generally characterized by small scale, often family run businesses. Growers often depend on the Dutch auction system for their revenues and suppliers operate mainly independently. Horizontal and vertical collaboration throughout the value chain is limited. This paper focuses on the question: how can the grower and the supplier in the greenhouse horticulture chain gain competitive advantage through radical product and process innovation. The challenge lies in time- to-market, in customer relationship, in developing new product/market combinations and in innovative entrepreneurship. In this paper an innovation and entrepreneurial educational and research programme is introduced. The programme aims at strengthening multidisciplinary collaboration between enterprise, education and research. Using best practice examples, the paper illustrates how companies can realize growth and improve innovative capabilities of the organization as well as the individual by linking economic and social sustainability. The paper continues to show how participants of the programme develop competencies by means of going through a learning cycle of single-loop, double-loop and triple loop learning: reduction of mistakes, change towards new concepts and improvement of the ability to learn. Furthermore, the paper discusses our four-year programme, whose objectives are trying to eliminate interventions that stimulate the innovative capabilities of SME's in this sector and develop instruments that are beneficial to organizations and individual entrepreneurs and help them make the step from vision to action, and from incremental to radical innovation. Finally, the paper illustrates the importance of combining enterprise, education and research in networks with a regional, national and international scope, with examples from the greenhouse horticulture sector. These networks generate economic regional and national growth and international competitiveness by acting as business accelerators.
The complexity of Information Technology (IT) is increasing; so are customer expectations. Consequently it is not easy for especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to keep track of all IT-developments, let alone leverage them in business operations with the aim to satisfy increasingly demanding customers. This also holds for the health care sector. This research is focussed on first line health care, and deals with the following research question; ‘which IT capabilities do SMEs within the first line health care sector need to have at their disposal in order to reach Business/IT-Alignment (BITA) maturity?’ Using the best practices ITIL, ASL and BiSL (cf. Bon, et al. 2007), IT capabilities are formulated. Based on the theory of Luftman (2000) business/IT-alignment and maturity is measured. Quantitative research of 123 first line health care SMEs in the Netherlands, confirms a moderate to strong correlation between the IT capability constructs ‘Organisation’, ‘Processes’, ‘Knowledge’ and ‘People’ on the one hand, and BITA maturity on the other. The results indicate that SMEs within the first line health care sector should invest in IT capabilities related to the enterprise's ‘Organisation’ and ‘Processes’ to strive for increased business and IT maturity.
Over the past 10 years, different types of financing have become available in the Netherlands. It is now possible to combine bank loans, crowdfunding loans and risk capital. Moreover, fintech applications lower the threshold for applications and reduce response times from weeks to just days or even hours. Fraser, Bhaumik and Wright (2015) point out there is a lack of knowledge of the cognitive process involved in selecting SME financing. This paper looks into the selection process financial advisers use, against the backdrop of the growing range of funding possibilities. To assess this process, we try to understand dominant habits and related heuristics. Within our explorative study, 19 experienced and independent SME financial advisers were interviewed. The questions address their knowledge, skills, experiences and choices in the selection process on the financing or refinancing of working capital and growth. Taking a grounded theoretical approach, we use Atlas TI to label all answers and statements step by step. The findings suggest a strong bias of decision-making towards the more traditional banking products. Yet advisers state they are aware of, and familiar with, other solutions. We have also found that fintech solutions are hardly used to prepare financing solutions up front. Financial advisers estimate the likelihood of acceptance by a few financial providers they know well within their personal network. We suggest that there is a behavioural approach to financing in the day-to-day decisions made by financial advisers. As long as automated selections are not fully transparent and are unable to combine all types of financing up front, financial advisers will be guided by habit or by availability, confirmation and affect heuristics, rather than looking for new financing solutions and combinations.
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