TITLE:
Collaborative Growth: How SMEs Create Opportunities for Other SMEs in the Global Economy
AUTHORS:
Md Omar Faruque, Ruhul Amin Md Rashed, Ashrafuzzaman Hera
KEYWORDS:
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), Inter-Firm Collaboration, Business Networks, Innovation Ecosystems, Resource-Based View (RBV), Open Innovation, Institutional Theory, Supply Chain Integration, Digital Transformation, Global Entrepreneurship
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.13 No.6,
June
12,
2026
ABSTRACT: Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) constitute the backbone of global economies, accounting for over 90% of businesses and more than half of employment worldwide. Beyond their individual contributions, SMEs increasingly act as mutual enablers of growth through inter-firm collaboration, co-innovation, and supply chain integration. This study investigates how SMEs create opportunities for one another within both domestic and international markets, emphasising mechanisms such as knowledge exchange, digital networking, and collective resilience. A mixed-methods research design was employed to ensure a comprehensive and globally representative analysis. A survey of 500 SMEs across five different economies, namely, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Kenya and Vietnam, was used to capture the variability across regions and sectors. The qualitative data were derived using case studies to demonstrate the cooperative practices in technology transfer, export relationships and joint innovation clusters. The methodology overcame the drawbacks of previous SME studies, which tended to be region- or homogeneous-based. These results indicate that there are four major themes: 1) Shared resource and capabilities between SMEs creates more operational efficiency and innovation performance; 2) Strategic alliances promote co-innovation and product diversification; 3) Digital platforms promote SME-to-SME business-to-business (B2B) linkages and global visibility; 4) Inter-SME collaboration builds resilience in case of market disruptions. All these dynamics reveal that SMEs are not individual players in an economic domain, but are rather networked nodes in larger entrepreneurial systems.Subject AreasBusiness Management