Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the driving engine behind economic growth. While SMEs play a critical role in generating employment and supporting trade, they face numerous challenges, the prominent among them are the need to respond to fasting time-to-market, low-cost and rapid solutions to complex organizational problems. Towards that end, research and development (R&D) aspect deserves particular attention to promote and facilitate the operations of SMEs. Virtual R&D team could be a viable option. However, literature shows that virtual R&D teaming in SMEs is still at its infancy. This article provides a comprehensive literature review on different aspects of virtual R&D teams collected from the reputed publications. The purpose of the state-of-the-art literature review is to provide an overview on the structure and dynamics of R&D collaboration in SMEs. Specifying the foundation and importance of virtual teams, the relationship between virtual R&D team and SMEs has been examined. It concludes with the identification of the gaps in the existing literatures and calls for future research. It is argued that setting-up an infrastructure for virtual R&D team in SMEs still requires a large amount of engineering efforts and deserves consideration at top level management.
Published in 2010.
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- ...Reference [11] developed one of the most comprehensive and widely accepted definitions of virtual teams: “virtual team is the small temporary groups of geographically, organizationally and/or time dispersed knowledge workers who coordinate their work, predominantly with electronic information and communication technologies in order to accomplish one or more organization tasks”...
- ...The availability of a flexible and configurable base infrastructure is one of the main advantages of agile virtual teams [11]...
- ...Although the on-line questionnaire sent to the targeted SMEs in the both countries, only 91 firms were met the criteria of SMEs definition „number of employees up to 15 and maximum turnover RM 25 million [11]‟ in this research so the rest of responded deducted from analysis...
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Virtual R&D Teams in Small and Medium Enterprises: A Literature Review
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