Towards Innovative SMEs: An Empirical Study of Regional Small and Medium Enterprises in Thailand.

This paper presents an empirical study of a Thai public university delivering its academic services to help regional SMEs in Thailand to move towards innovative entrepreneurship. This challenge of Thai SMEs is concerned with the current national development model known as Thailand 4.0. This development model is constructed following the industry 4.0 concept. The model has increased concerns among small firms required to enhance their creativity and innovation to create value-added businesses. This paper looks into the influence of the Thailand 4.0 concept on the development of regional small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It presents an empirical study of regional SMEs in the North-east region of Thailand trying to move towards innovative SME. The study employed mixed research methods. First, it employed strategic entrepreneurship concept to form a theoretical framework and research hypotheses. At this step, there was theoretical testing involving firm competitiveness, superior organizational innovation, and outstanding business creativity and their relationship with business performance. The researchers analyzed the quantitative data using statistic techniques, including VIFs, correlation analysis, and OLS regression analysis. At this step, the study was able to identify two essential components for SMEs performance and innovation, namely integrative new idea generation and market-leadership orientation. Given the initial results, the study then investigated the roles of universities in the promotion of regional SMEs performance and innovation. It focused on their contributions to integrative new idea generation and market-leadership orientation in the regional SMEs in particular. At this step, the research employed a qualitative case study using in-depth interviews for the data collection. As a result, this paper delivers study results on how a university provides academic services that help to enhance the integrative new idea generation and market-leadership orientation of regional SMEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]