Digital University-SME Interaction for Business Development

Introduction

A business model describes the business logic of a firm by reflecting on how it creates, delivers and captures value. A clear and competitive business model is thus the foundation for firm management and performance, specifying knowledge about customer needs and wishes, as well as how value can be proposed, delivered and captured. Developing a business model, however, is not a “once and for all” affair. No business model would last forever. Firms are under constant pressure to develop their business models in order to stay ahead - or at least keep abreast of - present and potential competition on the market (Saebi, Lien, & Foss, 2016). This implies that firms need to broaden or deepen their area of expertise, or at least keep their knowledge and skills up to date, to be able to make necessary improvements to processes, products and services (Day, 1994; Gould, 2009). In other words, firms have to keep business model building blocks like competencies and value propositions updated and competitive. A business model can be regarded as innovated when a single or several of its building blocks have been substantially changed (Amit & Zott, 2012; Koen, Bertels, & Elsum, 2011), and technological innovation is known as a key driver for business model innovation (Baden-Fuller & Haefliger, 2013).

Small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) require business models and business model innovations that meet their specific challenges of scale and resource limitations, the “liability of smallness”, but research has mainly focused on large enterprises (Amit & Zott, 2012; Bruderl & Schussler, 1990; Müller, Buliga, & Voigt, 2018). The business model innovation practices of SMEs thereby remain much of a black box (Foss & Saebi, 2016). As SMEs are critical to the economy of most nations (OECD, 2017), we need to learn more about, and find ways for, how SMEs can achieve technological innovation and work with subsequent business model innovation. With “SMEs for life” often being followers rather than developers, and SMEs increasingly needing external support due to the increasing complexity of new technologies (Bougrain & Haudeville, 2002), the often-needed support for them to innovate is usually provided in various forms by public business support agencies. Yet, such development support may not be effective in working with the SMEs on a one-to-one basis, and SME owners and management often feel that they have limited time to engage with issues other than operational tasks. Inspired by how a number of SMEs joined forces and worked with a university using e-learning to expand their abilities for technological and business model innovation, this chapter looks closer into how e-learning can be used for SMEs’ technological and business model innovation.

As part of online learning, e-learning refers to educational efforts for knowledge development using digital media as a pedagogical tool (Chang, 2016). E-learning initially focused on management, leadership, customer service, quality management, communication and human resource skills (Skillsoft, 2001 in Derouin et al., 2005). Nevertheless, it can be used for many different purposes and, not the least, facilitate lifelong learning. The case study presented in this chapter illustrates how a number of manufacturing SMEs from various lines of business, distributed over a seemingly vast Swedish region, found a way to cooperate that included joint e-learning arranged by a university, and which allowed the SMEs to develop skills related to structured, strategic and proactive R&D processes. This chapter specifically focuses on how the cooperation between a university and SMEs may adopt e-learning for business model processes. The purpose of the chapter is to describe and discuss the role of e-learning for SME business development. For the SME definition, we apply the limit of the European Union, that is, less than 250 employees. There is a tendency to treat SMEs as a group, as if they were all alike (Huggins et al., 2012). The here reported study, however, focuses on the lower half of this continuum, that is, firms with less than 125 employees.