Strategy development for knowledge-based, collaborative SMEs

Given today´s major economic trends such as increased networking, the rising importance of intangible assets and the acceleration of business processes, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) do barely dispose of appropriate methods and tools to take strategic decisions. Existing strategic management concepts often do not correspond to the needs and requirements that SMEs have, leading to unsatisfactory or even counterproductive results. Within this paper, a set of alternate strategic management tools is presented, taking into account the recent economic trends as well as the SMEs´ particular characteristics. These tools were designed to help entrepreneurs tackle various strategic issues in strategic planning sessions. Each tool is based on the use of graphical strategy templates, making strategy content and process more efficient and comprehensive, thus leading to decisions of higher quality.