89F. Utilizing Environment Knowledge for Competitive Advantage

摘要

The business environment is increasingly becoming uncertain and complex due to many factors and as a result environmental knowledge is becoming critical for organizations to survive and remain profitable in a highly dynamic, competitive, and volatile business environment. Organizations need to continuously monitor their environment and use this knowledge for making necessary adjustments in their business moves to stay relevant and competitive in the market. The main objective of this study was to investigate the environment scanning initiatives of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore and how this knowledge was processed, shared and utilized. A pre-tested questionnaire was used for collecting data and 46 SMEs, representing different industries, participated in the study. It was found that a majority of the participating companies were facing severe competition and nearly 85% of them considered environmental knowledge critical to their survival and growth. However, only one-half of the companies were regularly capturing, filtering, and disseminating the environment knowledge to their staff, while the remaining companies were undertaking these activities on an ad-hoc basis. This paper offers certain suggestions for systematic capturing and utilizing of environment knowledge by SMEs.