This study explored the processes of innovation among innovative rural manufacturing SMEs by using the narratives of the owner/mangers of case study firms and other actors involved in the innovation process. This was consistent with the ontology of critical realism that was selected which entailed the use of case study method as a tool for data collection. This study makes a number of incremental rather than radical contributions to innovation theory and our understanding of innovation among rural Manufacturing SMEs. The results of this study shows the importance of opinions of owner/managers in the measurement of innovation considering that the majority were either unaware of the need to register their innovation and the lack of support organizations in rural areas who can advice SMEs on the need for patents and the registration process. Regarding the characteristics of innovation in rural areas, the results showed that rural innovative SMEs are likely to be relatively strong in innovations where effects of scale are not yet important but where they can make use of their flexibility and proximity to market demand. The results of this study showed that SMEs received ideas for their innovations from various sources located both within and outside the case study area. The firms then used different approaches to develop their innovations including internalised design and externalised manufacturing, externalised design and internalised manufacturing, and internalised both design and manufacturing. Lastly, rurality did not appear to constrain the processes of innovation since SMEs had developed strategies that enabled them to adapt and adjust to their rural environment in order to remain innovative.

Background: In recent studies a lot of attention is drawn to the connection between networking and entrepreneurship. Many scholars consider successful business and networking inseparable. Taking into consideration the topicality of the two notions discussed above the authors of this thesis decided to conduct the research dedicated to these phenomena in the field that interests them most – in the field of Swedish fashion. Purpose: The purpose of the thesis is to gain a deeper insight into entrepreneur’s experiences to point out the role of entrepreneurial networking in the process of internationalization of a micro-sized Swedish fashion company and to contribute to the research in this field by telling its unique story. Method: To achieve the purpose of the research a narrative ethnographic research was conducted. This research strategy was chosen because it suits the purpose best by giving an opportunity to get fresh insights into the field of entrepreneurial networking from the point of view of the entrepreneur. The data collected has a narrative nature therefore narrative analysis is used to present it. The methods of gathering the data are face-to-face interview and documents. Conclusion: we can define the most important role of entrepreneurial networking on the internationalization process of Odeur as an effective accelerator and a tool to fulfil the knowledge and expertise gaps in certain areas through other actors in the network.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether the effects of hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) therapy could alter the critical size defect (CSD) diameter and to evaluate the effect of HBO on the repair of CSD in the presence and absence of a non-vascularized autogenous bone graft (ABG). Study Design: Twenty rabbits were divided in two groups of ten animals each. CSD were created in the parietal bones bilaterally. Defects were critical-sized, 15 mm on one side and supracritical-sized, 18 mm on the contralateral side. Group 1 received a 90-min HBO treatment sessions at 2.4 absolute atmospheric pressure (ATA) for 90 minutes per day for 20 days. Group 2 served as a normobaric roomair control (NBO). Additional ten animals were divided into 2 groups of 5 animals each. Bilateral CSD were created. ABG were allocated to one side of each calvarium. Group 1 received HBO treatments. Group 2 served as NBO. After sacrifice, data were collected including qualitative assessment, radiographic analysis, Micro CT bone analysis and histomorphometric analysis. ANOVA and paired sample t test were used for statistical analysis. Results: Both radiographic analysis and histomorphometric analysis demonstrated more new bone in the HBO CSD (p<.001). Micro CT analysis indicated a higher bone mineral content (BMC) in ABG CSD (p<.05). Histologically, complete bridging of the defect was observed in ABG defects. Histomorphometric analysis showed that HBO treatment increased new bone and marrow and reduced fibrous tissue in the defects (p<.01 for all). Conclusion: Bone regeneration was significantly greater in the HBO animals regardless of the defect size. HBO may have changed the accepted diameter of CSD to more than 18 mm. HBO enhances bony healing in non-grafted CSD.

This thesis evaluates how municipal transit ridership in mid-sized cities is influenced by external factors. External factors are forces outside a municipality’s direct control but potentially affect the municipality in some way, in particular its transit ridership. The thesis also determines the appropriateness of municipal levels of response to each factor. Two mid-sized municipalities in Ontario, Canada – the City of Kingston and Region of Waterloo – were studied. The evaluation, first, identifies the trends or “current conditions” between the municipalities and five sets of external factors to determine influence on ridership. The factors are 1. Population Growth and Density; 2. Demographics (Seniors, Students and Immigrants); 3. Regional Location; 4. Federal/Provincial Impacts; and 5. Fuel Prices. Second, the municipality’s level of response was measured in three ways. Staff awareness of the factor and its influence was gauged using key informant interviews and municipal councillor surveys conducted by the researcher. Internal policy and guidance documents measured whether policies relating to each factor are appropriate. Finally, observations of implemented initiatives determined whether they appropriately deal with each factor. The study finds that more external factors act on Waterloo than Kingston. Therefore, Waterloo has strong incentives to prioritize – among many municipal responsibilities – its transit system and to focus on increasing ridership. The strongest incentives for Waterloo are population growth, the student demographic and federal/provincial impacts. Kingston has only one strong incentive: the senior demographic. The study also finds that Waterloo has appropriate levels of response to more of the external factors than does Kingston. Recommendations for Kingston and Waterloo are provided for improving their levels of response to each set of factors. The paper concludes that municipal size is an important driver, but internal levels of response are critical success factors. The data analysis matrix developed for this study can be used by other municipalities to help identify appropriateness of internal responses as they relate to the influence of external factors within their municipality.

This thesis analyses the ways of strengthening Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in Turkey and promoting entrepreneurship in the light of the current EU policies from a holistic approach. Analyses of theoretical framework and exploring the structure of SMEs, existing support policies and the future strategies of both European Union and Turkey are the major stages of this study. This thesis makes critical evaluation of SME policies in Turkey by pointing out their weaknesses, which are supported by the results obtained from the case study conducted on SMEs in Adana. This study also attempts to develop some recommendations in order to eliminate shortcomings of SME policy in Turkey. The main idea of this thesis is that a long term strategy, which should be developed in order to promote entrepreneurship and support Turkish SMEs requires reassessment of the policies and developing effective measures in wide range of policy domains such as, R&amp / D, technology, labor markets, financial markets, education and social policies.

Venture capital (VC) has been accepted to play an important role in encouraging of entrepreneurship, maintaining technological improvement and, urban and regional development in the country besides providing financial support for small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) with high growth potential. This thesis analyzes the reasons of the limited venture capital investments in Turkey and the measures that should be taken in order to increase both the effectiveness of VC in maintaining urban and regional development and VC investments to SMEs. Furthermore, VC is emphasized to be an important model that can be efficient in solving the financing, management and technical problems of SMEs with high growth potential. In order to analyze the problems, a field research was conducted. Research consists of two parts. In the first part, the questionnaire was conducted with 100 SMEs in Ankara that are active in OSTIM so as to reveal the general characteristics of SMEs and the funds they use to solve their financial problems in start-up and expansion stages. SMEs are generally family run firms that have limited capital and whose owner is also the manager in the firm. Equity capital is the most important source that is used in the start-up and expansion stages by the firms. The rate of usage of subsidies like investment and export incentives and technology development support, credit guarantee fund and venture capital by these firms is low. Lack of knowledge, insufficiency of qualified staff and bureaucratic barriers are the most significant reasons of this situation. In the second part, interviews with venture capitalists or managers of 3 important VC firms that are active in Turkey come up. These interviews aimed to reveal the goal of VC firms, evaluation process of the applications and VC firms&rsquo / expectations from SMEs. VC firms face difficulties with the projects with no growth potential. Moreover, applicant firms do not have adequate staff and supplies in order to prepare the financial information for the application process, and this happens to be a crucial problem. According to the results of the field research, some suggestions are tried to be put forward in terms of the achievement of a more effective use of VC system in Turkey. In this regard, firstly, efficiency of subsidies-particularly institutions that provide R&amp / D supports- should be increased. Secondly, Credit Guarantee Fund should be strengthened in order to provide more entrepreneurs with guarantee support. And finally, establishment of a center that is to provide consultancy for applicant firms in their project development and application periods is suggested.

This thesis analyses the utilization of intellectual property rights (IPRs) by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), their contribution to economic and technological development and policies to be implemented for the SMEs to make more use of the system in order to reach a desired level of growth. Small and medium-scaled enterprises constitute more than 90 % of all firms almost all over the world and a substantial proportion of employment and turnover. This fact bares the necessity for the SMEs to make more use of the intellectual property rights system which is one of the components of innovation and technological growth, in order to achieve the desired level of economic and technological development. This paper discusses the existing and possible contribution of the IPRs obtained by SMEs to economic and technological development and the policies to be implemented in order to encourage intensive utilization of the system by the SMEs. The results of surveys previously carried out both in Turkey and abroad are incorporated within the results of a survey which was organized in the context of this thesis among 86 enterprises in 12 organized industrial zones all over Turkey. The latter survey measures the IPR utilization of the SMEs and the reasons behind under-utilization. Among the firms studied, 60 % of them are R&amp / D performers, 34 % have a distinct R&amp / D department while 56 % of them reported to have developed a new product, process or design. However only one third of these innovative firms have had an IP application and the percentage was even lower with IPR supports / only 2.3 % of the firms applied for IPR supports. The main reason for this underutilization of both IPRs and IPR supports was found as lack of awareness. Policy proposals were tried to be put forward depending on the findings of the survey and raising awareness was defined as the most important measure to be taken.

The prevalence of multicore architectures has accentuated the need for scalable on-chip communication media. Various parallel applications and programming paradigms use a mix of unicast (one-to-one) and multicast (one-to-many) to maintain data coherence and consistency. Providing efficient support for these communication patterns becomes a critical design point for on-chip networks (OCN). High performance on-chip networks design advocates balanced traffic across the whole network, which makes adaptive routing appealing. Adaptive routing explores the path diversity of the network, increases throughput, and reduces network latency compared with oblivious routing. In this work, we propose an adaptive multicast routing, Balanced Recursive Partitioning Multicast (B-RPM), to achieve balanced one-to-many on-chip communication. The algorithm derives its functionality from previously proposed algorithm Recursive Partitioning Multicast (RPM). Unlike RPM which uses fixed set of directional priorities and position of destination nodes, B-RPM replicates packet based on the local congestion information and position of destination nodes with respect to current node. B-RPM employs a new deadlock avoidance technique Dynamically Sized Virtual Networks (DSVN). Built upon the traditional virtual networks, DSVN dynamically allocates the network resources to different VNs according to the run-time traffic status, which delivers better resources utilization. We also propose a new scheme for representing multiple destinations in packet head. The scheme works simply by differentiating multicast and unicast packets. The algorithm combined with dynamically sized virtual networks enables us to improve network performance at high load on average by 20% (up to 50%) and saturation throughput of network on average by 10% (up to 18%) over the most recent multicast algorithm. Also the new header representation scheme enables us to save 24% of dynamic link power.

This dissertation focuses on how entrepreneurs learn to acquire entrepreneurial knowledge and competence, which ultimately can open doors to business success. Contemporary critics suggest that programs designed to develop general competence are not sufficiently relevant to these entrepreneurs. On the other hand, scholars and practitioners have recently noticed that external relations in formal learning networks can be a notable opportunity for learning in entrepreneurs. The aim of this dissertation is to elaborate on the processes and outcomes of government supported learning networks among entrepreneurs who work in small and medium sized enterprises. It draws on reports of four separate but interrelated research studies that author conducted. The research described in the dissertation is based on multiple theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and data sources. To gain a full understanding of the experiences of the different network participants, as well as the interactive processes within the learning network, data were collected from multiple sources: interviews, participant observation, and videotaping. The conclusions stated in appended paper 1 and 2 are primarily based on the interviews, but they are also supported by the observations and written material. Paper three focuses on the videos in combination with the interviews. Finally, to complement the qualitative research with insights regarding the relationships among trust, learning, and self-efficacy, the last paper reports the results of a quantitative survey study. The dissertation makes several major contributions to knowledge. First and foremost, by combining entrepreneurship theory and learning theory, it describes the outcomes that can emerge from formal learning networks and shows how these outcomes can have entrepreneurial consequences. Second, it suggests how the learning situation can be characterized and describes an appropriate learning environment for entrepreneurs from small and medium sized enterprises. The research also contributes to theory on how trust in formal learning networks is built and how this trust contributes to entrepreneurial learning. At the same time, it shows that the potential benefits derived from trust cannot be realized without incorporating the entrepreneur’s level of self-efficacy in the analysis. The dissertation concludes by offering suggestions for exploiting learning and business opportunities through the construction and utilization of learning networks.

This thesis investigates the processes and influential factors affecting the internationalisation of SMEs in manufacturing industries in Malaysia. Internationalisation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has been widely researched but little is known of how and why internationalisation takes place in developing countries and this lack of evidence in the literature provides strong grounds for this study. Jones and Coviello (2005) suggest investigation of internationalisation should include the broad range of internationalisation theories, such as the Incremental and Rapid internationalisation models, Networking, Resource-based and International Entrepreneurship perspectives. These perspectives examine the awareness, process, driving forces and influential factors relevant to SME internationalisation. Therefore, the patterns and dimensions of internationalisation, including the modes of foreign entry, market selection, triggering factors, awareness of international opportunities were investigated, as were the problems and challenges faced by internationalising firms and the key drivers influencing the internationalisation process. A critical realism paradigm and qualitative method were employed. In-depth interviews were conducted with 16 Malaysian experts and 54 Malaysian-based CEOs, owners, and/ or key executives from SME manufacturing industries using a semi-structured interview guide. The data was analysed with the statistical package NVivo 7 and also manually to improve triangulation of the results. The results are largely inductive and interpretive and are presented in qualitative-themes as well as some basic statistical analyses. The findings indicate that interrelated factors influence the internationalisation process of Malaysian SMEs. Various paces, a myriad of entry modes and broad market scopes determine the pattern of internationalisation undertaken. A traditional internationalisation pattern is strongly evident, although some companies exhibited rapid and born global patterns, depending on their industry, products, organisational competencies, knowledge and access to information or because of a change of management. The main drivers of internationalisation centred on key personnel and firm competencies. The study also found that while domestic and global forces motivate internationalisation, aspects of Government policy, procedures and international requirements inhibit the process. More importantly, the findings suggest that networking relationships create internationalisation awareness and provide appropriate pathways to internationalisation for manufacturing SMEs in Malaysia and this is an area where strategies could be improved. The increasing emphasis on the SME sector for enhancing economic and social development in Malaysia means they can make substantial contributions to development and understanding how to improve internationalisation strategies will increase those gains. More transparent government policies and coherence among supporting agencies as well as structured and relevant networks would assist the internationalisation of Malaysian SMEs. Currently, internationalisation processes are constrained by limited resources and difficulty in accessing assistance and supports. This study provides new knowledge and important insights that will benefit manufacturing and other industries in Malaysia and other developing countries.