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Our purpose in this study is to explore the factors that lead to the success of small labels and their individual releases. We surveyed top-level managers of small classical labels about the key reasons for success or failure of their labels in general and of specific releases in particular. We gained useful managerial insights into the importance of package design, promotions, timing of releases, and distribution.

Human resource management (HRM) in the computer games sector needs to be seen within its industry context. The structure of this part of the creative media industry, the way it is geographically clustered and networked, the extent to which it is largely project based, and its use of a core and periphery workforce are important influences on its human resource (HR) policies and practices. The sector is dominated by a small number of transnational corporations, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, but primarily populated by small to medium-sized companies with a staff strength of 35–60 (Kerr and Flynn, 2003). In the United Kingdom, these constitute 75 per cent of the sector. This is a global industry and predicted to be worth some $68.4 billion in 2012 and $86.7 billion in 2014, an annual growth rate of over 10 per cent. In 2009 it employed 7,000 people in the United Kingdom down from 9400 in 2004. Eighty-nine per cent worked in development, the remainder working in functional support; 77 per cent of organizations used freelancers while 29 per cent expected to increase their usage in the near future (Skillset, 2011). Traditionally companies of this size do not employ HR professionals. The workforce is heavily gendered: women constitute 6 per cent (12 per cent in 2006) of the workforce compared with 47 per cent nationally. Similarly, 3 per cent come from minority ethnic backgrounds (4 per cent in 2006) compared with 9 per cent nationally (Skillset, 2011).

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) textile and clothing firms had been facing multiple challenges of competitiveness. During the last past ten years the industry has dramatically declined and the only firm under review has managed to secure its survival by concentrating on niche markets. The previous situation is principally due to infrastructural challenges, second hand products, institutional instability, illegal imports from the East Asian countries and other internal problem. Here, special attention is given to La Societe Textile de Kisangani (SOTEXKI), the only survival company in the DRC textile and clothing industry. This paper tries to explore the reasons why this survival company in the DRC textile industry continuously cope with these low cost competitions by looking at what works in the industry, why and what can be done to make things work better? It proposes to look at the different production paradigms (labour issues and value added production paradigm) by exploring their effectiveness to promote the textile industry’s survival and competitiveness. It then discusses some of the findings about this survival company in the DRC textile industry. In brief, an exploratory result from the fieldwork revealed the pertinence of involving in best labour practices and value added production paradigm to promote competitiveness and keeping the firm survival. Further results indicated that SOTEXKI as an integrated industry with significant forward and backward linkages focuses on value added production paradigms and keeps consistently complying to the best labour practices to remain survival and competitive. SOTEXKI is quite performing well. Key words: Survival, competitiveness, industry, labour cost cutting, retrenchment, and value added production paradigm.

Existing research approaches the return on investment expected by entrepreneurs from the perspective of the investor. This paper argues that this perspective is inadequate when applied to entrepreneurs of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). In fact, return on equity cannot be ascertained from financial reports or markets. Entrepreneurs cannot provide a figure since their decision to invest in the venture is driven by many other reasons over and above simple return on equity.The solution suggested in this paper is to approach the issue by viewing the entrepreneurs as a special kind of lenders who expect a return for the risk they incur from the possible bankruptcy of the firm and the impact this would have on their personal wealth. We decompose the entrepreneur risk into a cluster risk (cluster survival rate) and a firm specific risk (historical unsuccess of the entrepreneur). We relate both through the introduction of a Markov transition probability matrix. The transition probabilities are modeled with a logit and estimated with Maximum-Likelihood. The overall risk is, then weighted by the percentage of personal wealth the entrepreneur invested in the venture both directly (as equity) and indirectly (as collateralized debt). In fact, collateralized debt bears both the cost of debt and a 'smoothed' cost of equity since in case of liquidation the entrepreneur will have to repay only the part of debt that will not be covered by firm’s assets. We work out the weighted average cost of capital considering that the financial structure of the firm is characterized by equity, collateralized debt and uncollateralized debt. In the paper the point of equilibrium between the cost of equity and the cost of collateralized debt as well as the optimal mix between equity and collateralized debt is worked out and discussed.