Business leaders spell out SME priorities to ministers
Business leaders marked out their message to governments worldwide on 3 June at a symposium held on the eve of the OECD Ministerial Conference on small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Istanbul, Turkey. Co-chair of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) business symposium, Peter Fritz, assured listeners that these recommendations would be different to those coming from other conferences: 'These recommendations have one very important ingredient. We are looking for practical, long term outcomes. For example, we are looking for endorsement for project proposals,' he said. Some messages were reiterated with a frequency assuring that they would be passed on to ministers: the role of the government as a facilitator, the need for clustering and cooperation, and for ensuring access to new technologies, particularly information communication technologies (ICTs), so that all potential entrepreneurs are able to benefit from globalisation. 'We need an ecology of firms that copes with uncertainty and is able to take risk,' said keynote speaker Michael Klein, Vice-President of Private Sector Development at the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation. 'We also need a routine - a way of doing things. And we need a selection mechanism to work out the right way of doing things.' Mr Klein also placed emphasis on finding the right balance between cooperation and competition. While strongly supportive of SMEs, 'there is no point in praising companies for being small - we need to praise them for being good,' added Mr Klein. More needs were outlined by Mr Fritz. What still has to be worked out, he said, is 'what are the intangible investments?', 'how can knowledge be measured?', and 'how can security of communication be guaranteed?' Severi Kainälä, a member of UNICE's (the Union of Industrial and Employers' Confederations of Europe) committee on entrepreneurship and SMEs, had another list of recommendations for national authorities. Governments should not only increase investment for research and innovation, but should introduce incentives. They should also support mechanisms for protecting intellectual property rights, and should define national innovation strategies, he said. Mr Kainälä also called on governments to promote innovation-oriented research at universities by first finding out what business needs, to adapt education curricula accordingly, and to encourage clustering. The onus was not, however, solely on governments to improve the competitiveness of SMEs. The most common cause of failure, explained Stan Jeffery, CEO of Ballarat University Technology Park in Australia, is disagreement between the founders of an SME. New small companies are often the result of a partnership between an engineer and someone from business. On account of the often different experiences and expectations in these different sectors, 'roles and relationships must be clarified early on,' he said. One of the concrete outcomes that participants are hoping for is the endorsement of a proposal to create an international network of networks, to be called REMTECH, initially in the automotive components industry. Turkey, Italy, Brazil and Australia have already said they would like to be involved, and other countries have shown an interest, according to Ali Coskun, Turkey's Minister for Industry and Trade. Jan Nahum, former president of Fiat's international development business unit in Italy, presented the initiative. The idea is based on a Turkish network, Target, created in order to guarantee Turkey's competitiveness in the automotive components sector by generating new technology. The vision was to become a world leader in this sector, and the method was to be developing new technology, he explained. REMTECH would bring together all of those existing SMEs which are rich in know-how, but which are not contributing to the market at present. The network would include the totality of the value chain, from engineers to suppliers, and would avoid duplication of technology creation. Individual countries already have a variety of SME networks, said Mr Nahum. The idea behind REMTECH is that these networks form links with other networks in a different sector, or a different country, or both. The automotive components sector was selected as a starting point because of its wide range of disciplines, but the proposal foresees a flexible model which can be transferred to other sectors that other countries may consider more relevant. 'Such networks have to be managed,' said Mr Nahum. He therefore proposed creating a management office, to act like a secretariat. 'Networks cannot be left to run themselves. You have to make sure it's alive in its infancy until it has created enough partnerships to survive on its own.' Interested parties are hoping for a declaration of intent, which would then be followed by the identification of core partners and the drafting of a business plan.
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Türkiye