Examining the competitiveness of Hungarian small businesses

Source: Own editing*

While small units constitute the vast majority of the business sector, our knowledge about the small and medium-sized businesses is limited. To close the gap in small business research, we have developed a unique questionnaire that is a useful tool to measure small business competitiveness. Up to now, we have collected data on 1200 Hungarian and 700 other country businesses. We plan to continue this data collection in 2021 and 2023. The small business competitiveness index consists of ten pillars -human capital, product, domestic market, networks, technology, decision-making, strategy, marketing, internationalisation, and online presence – representing ten features of small business operation. In this project, we would like to examine five important aspects of competitiveness.  By analyzing the composition of these pillars, we could provide useful suggestions on small business stakeholders on how to improve the competitiveness of their business. By collecting additional data about the environment of SMEs, we are able to provide useful policy suggestions to local policymakers on how to improve the institutional, local business atmosphere. We are also planning to shed light on the connection between competitiveness and business financial performance. Small businesses export intensity is much lower than large firms, so we aim to identify the key factors of internationalisation and export. Finally, we would like to develop new complex performance measures for family businesses that are more appropriate to quantity family business characteristics and compare them to other nonfamily types of ventures.

* Read the full paper: Lafuente, E. et al. (2019) BRQ Business Research Quarterly, DOI: 10.1016/j.brq.2019.02.002 here.