The ongoing digitization of multiple industries has drastically reduced the half-life of skills and capabilities acquired by knowledge workers through formal education. Thus, firms are forced to make significant ongoing investments in training their employees to remain competitive. Existing research has not examined the role of training in improving firm level productivity of knowledge firms. This paper provides an innovative econometric framework to estimate returns to such employee training investments made by firms. We use a panel dataset of small-to-medium sized Indian IT services firms and assess how training enhances human capital, a critical input for such firms, thereby improving firm revenues. We use econometric approaches based on optimization of the firm's profit function to eliminate the endogenous choice of inputs common in production function estimations. We find that increase in training investments is significantly linked to increase in revenue per employee. Further, marginal returns to training are increasing in firm size. Therefore, relatively speaking, large firms benefit more from training. For the median company in our data, we find that a dollar invested in training yields a return of $4.67, and this effect approximately grows 2.5 times for the 75th percentile sized firm. A variety of robustness checks, including the use of Data Envelopment Analysis, are used to establish the veracity of our results.

This book examines access to training by SMEs across seven regions in six OECD countries: New Zealand, Poland, Belgium, UK, Turkey and Canada.

The ability to manage knowledge is relevant for millions of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) that operate in high-tech environments. They strongly depend on external knowledge about customers, technologies, and competitors because, as opposed to large companies, they have limited internal knowledge resources and little power to control their business environments. Present KM literature, however, mainly focuses on large companies and therefore does not explain, how SMEs, for example, can successfully apply groupware, data mining, semantic networks, and knowledge maps. This book addresses this problem by introducing the concept of knowledge integration (KI) that places emphasis on the identification, acquisition and use of external knowledge. Drawing from this theoretical basis, the book presents concepts and instruments specifically designed for SMEs, as well as examples of their implementation and use in practice.

This title was first published in 2003. The book covers the areas of: entrepreneurship and economic development; entrepreneurship theories (traditional and alternative); entrepreneurship education and training programmes; a comparative European analysis of entrepreneurship programmes; a profile of the aspiring entrepreneur; assessing effectiveness; and a framework for the design and development of entrepreneurship training programmes. Readers should gain a significant insight into the effectiveness of entrepreneurship training programmes from both the programme providers' and participants' point of view. Key features of the book include: an up-to-date review of the literature in this field; a comparative analysis of entrepreneurship programmes with a European perspective; an in-depth treatment of the effectiveness issue both on a qualitative and quantitative basis, and a longitudinal study involving a control and comparator group. The framework proposed by the authors should be applicable on a European scale.