<p> </p><p>As we know, China is the biggest developing country with a high speed at its economy development. More and more foreign businesspersons have joined in the promising and attractive Chinese market in order to catch some profitable opportunities to do businesses. However, a lot of issues need to be paid attention to in the business operation. Thus, there are some issues to be presented in this thesis regarding what are the effective ways to do business with China? Understanding the China's culture is an important and essential issue for foreign businesspersons. China's entry the WTO opened its door to more foreign investors who have be granted many preferential policies. Meanwhile, it is also a great challenge for the development of China. And Sino-EU business relationship aslo will be presented in this research to explain how it will take effect on the business doing between the two sides.</p><p>This research has been approached through the methods of theoretical studies and interviews. It is quite essential for businesspersons to catch the opportunities to do business in the competitive Chinese market and be familiar with the advantageous factors in order to do business effectively in China.</p><p> </p><p> </p>

<p>The aim of this study is to illustrate, adapt and develop methods of survival analysis in analysing and estimating customer survival time in subscription-based businesses. Two particular objectives are studied. The rst objective is to redene the existing survival analysis techniques in business terms and to discuss their uses in order to understand various issues related to the customer-rm relationship.</p>

PROBLEM DISCUSSION: Vaggeryd is a small municipality Småland. In addition to its strategic position along the main traffic route E4, Vaggeryd is very interesting also because of its advanced view on growing of the business sector, in both short and long-term per- spective. To meet that goal the municipality of Vaggeryd started to invest in “Egenföretagareutbildningen” EFU in cooperation with Jönköping International Business School (JIBS). The main idea is that students attend the courses that are held by JIBS and during their studies start their own business in a local business incubator called Fenix. PURPOSE: To host such education requires a huge amount of energy and resources from the municipality, which consequently would like to get answers to questions like “Is it worth investing in the education?” or “What are the results of such education?” The aim of this paper is to give the answers to those crucial questions though I believe that the time that has passed from the beginning of the education is too short and that the number of the students was not large enough to get definitive answers. This paper concentrates on a narrow part of the qualitative research methods – an inter- view. It is divided into two parts, a theoretical part and the empirical findings. FINDINGS: The research showed that six students out of a total of ten from generation 2005 started a new venture, three will take over a family business, and one has not decided to start a business yet. Of six students in generation 2003 four have started a business and one of them finished in bankruptcy, one plans to start a business in the future and one does not have a good business idea. RECOMMENDATIONS: Answers that the interviews returned gave interesting sugges- tions to both the municipality of Vaggeryd and JIBS about how to improve EFU. I would emphasise two, I believe, the most important recommendations. First municipality has to attract neighbouring municipalities in the EFU project. In addition, a greater effort should be made to help students build a spider’s web of business contacts.

The purpose is to gain an understanding of the marketing knowledge and tools single person businesses have and use within the service sector in southern Sweden. Previous research on single person businesses in Sweden and their marketing knowledge and usage of marketing tools is very scarce. Many small firms suffer from resource poverty and this is often a reason for why they market their firms in certain ways. By asking single person business owners why, how and what they do to market their firms the authors will find a general pattern and a deeper understanding. During a pre-study conducted to capture the essence of the issue before starting the research, it was found that there existed several marketing knowledge gaps. It is therefore of interest to study the marketing knowledge among single person business owners in Sweden. To meet the purpose a qualitative research approach was chosen. The qualitative data was collected through six in-depth interviews with single person business owners. The answers from the interviews generated a picture of the usage of marketing knowledge and tools among single person business owners in Sweden. The result of this study showed that all of the single person business owners thought that since their firms were small businesses, well developed marketing strategies was more of a luxury than a necessity. It was clear that they instead used effectual reasoning when marketing their firms. Concerning knowledge, the results showed that a mixture of education and work experience is the optimal combination. It was also clear that service firms usually find difficulties with intangibility and all of the interviewees knew that they have to use a special approach when marketing services. Through the authors’ findings, it is hard to tell if there is an optimal marketing strategy since most of the interviewees do not perform any follow-ups and therefore do not know what works and what does not.

As we know, China is the biggest developing country with a high speed at its economy development. More and more foreign businesspersons have joined in the promising and attractive Chinese market in order to catch some profitable opportunities to do businesses. However, a lot of issues need to be paid attention to in the business operation. Thus, there are some issues to be presented in this thesis regarding what are the effective ways to do business with China? Understanding the China's culture is an important and essential issue for foreign businesspersons. China's entry the WTO opened its door to more foreign investors who have be granted many preferential policies. Meanwhile, it is also a great challenge for the development of China. And Sino-EU business relationship aslo will be presented in this research to explain how it will take effect on the business doing between the two sides. This research has been approached through the methods of theoretical studies and interviews. It is quite essential for businesspersons to catch the opportunities to do business in the competitive Chinese market and be familiar with the advantageous factors in order to do business effectively in China.

This thesis is an effort to analyze the importance of business network partners for successful participation in trade shows for small firms to grow more in international markets. This study would be helpful to demonstrate the value of trade shows. Trade shows provide the opportunities to introduce new products, expand network connection, and enhancing firm’s corporate image. To participate in any trade show may be a very lucrative process, but there are many challenges and tasks which are to be met to get the maximum share of international market. To analyse the effectiveness of business network for successful participation in trade shows, I have included one case study of trade shows, named Beauty World 2009, held at Frankfurt Germany. In this show, among the firms from all over the world, 16 small companies manufacturing beauty instruments, companies from my home city, namely Sialkot, Pakistan, also participated. Their experiences, participation, views and observation will also be used to analyze the importance of trade show for creating new business networks through this show. This research indicates the effectiveness of network member providing support to small and growing firms for successful participation in trade shows. With the help of these network members, trade shows can be used as exclusive platforms to introduce new firms, as well as products, to potential consumers. In general, we can indicate that existing network partners, if mobilized accordingly, have the ability to reduce the overall cost incurred at trade shows.

Background: The Swedish food industry has changed dramatically during the last decades and to become and remain as a player has become a demanding task for several of the small and medium sized enterprises (SME). The trading blocs have increased the development of their own brand (DOB) and this has given the SME new competition but also the possibility to produce these products for the trading blocs. In addition to this the trading blocs have be-come more and more centralized and to strengthen their position in nego-tiations and other aspects which are important for the trading blocs. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of how the trad-ing blocs, with their development of their own brand, affect the Swedish small and medium sized producers in the food industry. It is also to look into what kinds of strategies that are used by the SME in order to tackle the competition from the distributors own brands. Method: To fulfill our purpose a qualitative approach has been used for this thesis. Seven different interviews have been done, either by phone or face to face, with the three largest trading blocs and with four the SME in Sweden, three producing and one distributing company. Conclusion: The focus on low prices and the trading blocs’ stronger, central position on the market have made the competition more intense. To be or remain as a player on the market it is important for the SME to be a supplier to the trading blocs. However, since there are many players striving to become a supplier it is a tough situation and the price becomes an important factor. The trading blocs want low prices and keep pushing the suppliers to keep them low, or even lower them. This price focus is a major issue for the SME, and the DOB have become an important mean for the trading blocs to keep prices low. Due to scenarios like this it is very important for the SME to have strategies in place and the most common and most efficient is the bypass and flanking attack strategies. These two strategies are intense and keep the SME alert when it comes to product development and new innovations.

The value creating mechanism of business networks has been acknowledged in research (Casson &amp; Della Giusta, 2007, p. 221; Granovetter, 1973; Jones, Hesterly &amp; Borgatti, 1997, p. 912). Within small business research, focus has been on network structure (Jack, Moult, Anderson &amp; Dodd. 2010, p. 317; Shaw, 2006, p. 5; Curran et al., 1993, p. 13), disregarding dynamic factors such as network content, strength and processes. Network studies within start-up businesses have received attention (Witt, 2004, p 392); hence limited research exists concerning more well-established small businesses’ networks. These research gaps will here be addressed from the perspective of a smaller business, a micro business, at a stage of firm maturity. Small business research suffers from methodological fragmentation and underdevelopments, favoring positivistic and quantitative methods (Blackburn &amp; Kovalainen, 2009, p. 128-129). To address this, this research seeks to explore qualitative alternatives, which can be increasingly fruitful for the small business field when studying networks (Jack et al., 2010, p. 317). Recognizing the social and contextual embeddedness of the micro business and its sensitivity to external changes (Curran &amp; Blackburn, 2001, p. 7), this research opts for a qualitative in-depth case study to explore these contextual mechanisms. This research adopts a critical realist stance using ethnographic and process research methods of grounded theory, taking the sequence of events into account in the analysis. This present research combines strands of research of core disciplines (sociology) to newer disciplines (entrepreneurship) to produce a conceptual mapping. This deductive conceptual mapping is used as basis for the data collection and as a tool for analysis in this by nature inductive study. This study finds that network tie content and strength deepen the understanding of networks and their maintenance, beyond the static mapping of structure. Network tie content and strength does influence structure and is in turn influenced by context. This provides answer to why the network appears as it does. The appearance of the mature micro business’ network indicates that growth ambitions can be inhibited by contextual factors such as limited access to new opportunities. This present study finds and agrees with Van Maanen (2011a, p. 226-227) that the single case study and ethnographic observant-participant methods, often criticized for not producing substantial findings, are informative as they allow exploring the influence of contextual factors. The intended audience of research academics and local/regional/national entrepreneurship policy makers should recognize that research which enhances tools for apprehending contextual factors can provide interesting results. The research design disregards generalization capabilities in favor of accounting for the research process of the researcher and its subject. This is argued to give a fruitful version of truth of network appearance in terms of content and strength and why it appears as such.

This exploratory research focuses on impacts of the rural socio-cultural context on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) adoption for business information needs using the Maldives as the study context, and attempts to develop a model to capture the influences of the rural context on ICT adoption decisions. The numerous ways in which rural context differs from urban context, such as small markets combined with familiarity among community members and reliance on interpersonal relationships, suggest potential impacts on the nature and management practices of rural businesses and provide an approach to explore ICT use in rural settings. Using findings from the literature, a theoretical framework was developed to outline how the socio-cultural context of a rural community of a developing country might affect ICT adoption by rural businesses. The research model predicts relationships between context factors and perceived benefits and barriers of ICTs, and between these perceptions and intentions to adopt/use ICTs. The initial phase of the research was exploratory in nature focusing on a few selected rural and urban businesses and the second phase consisted of a quantitative survey of 314 rural and urban businesses. The findings supported predicted differences between rural and urban contexts for all five factors included in the research model. The results also show that context factors explain 35.5% of variance on perceived benefits of ICTs and 49.3% variance on perceived barriers of ICTs. The findings raised questions about the disjoint between opinions of ICTs and actual use and the limited value derived from ICTs. The research also highlighted that promoting ICT adoption in rural businesses was a highly complex issue that has important linkages to public policy support. Overall, this research provides important insights into the complex dynamics that exist in rural settings that have implications for ICT use and provides empirical evidence to illustrate differences between urban and rural contexts, as well as the level of influence from different context factors on ICT adoption. This research has relevance for organizations working towards the development of rural communities.

In industry, energy efficiency reduces operating cost and emissions to the environment whiles enhancing energy security. In order to ensure the sustainability of micro and small scale businesses in a developing country such as Ghana, measures that can ensure energy efficiency are therefore essential for these businesses to have a productive and economical operation that will ensure their sustainability. In this study, the potential of energy efficiency measures for micro and small scale businesses have been examined by performing industrial energy systems analysis on some selected micro and small scale businesses in Kumasi-Ghana through a practical study and administering of questionnaire about their energy consumption. Legislative instruments that are linked with energy use in Ghana were looked into. Some possible energy efficiency measures that could be adopted by these businesses have been analyzed. In this study it is established that energy supply to these businesses is not reliable and it is continuously becoming expensive. In addition, other findings were that value could be added to the processes of these businesses if they incorporate energy efficiency measures in their operations. The main driving force that will encourage these businesses to incorporate energy efficiency measures in their operation is the energy prices increase; therefore, their interest is the measures that could reduce their energy cost rather than the positive impacts that will come to the environment. In doing this renewable energy has the greatest potential in ensuring energy efficiency to these businesses. Finally, it is established that there are no specific legislations on energy use that will bring negative effects to these businesses and this could create enabling environment for private investors of energy efficiency.