Technology and Higher Education: What Works and what is the Future?

It has been noted by the numerous empirical studies on factors influencing success of small and medium scale enterprises that the variables of creativity, self-confidence, size of small and medium scale enterprises are important variables to bring about the success or growth of any small and medium scale enterprises. Duh (2003) examined the primary factors significant in affecting success of small and medium scale enterprises and found that owners’ or managers’ characteristics; enterprise characteristics and the contextual elements of small and medium scale enterprises development were significant factors. From a management perspective, the concept of success often refers to the enterprise’s financial performance. However, there is no universally accepted definition of success and as such; business success is interpreted in numerous ways from various dimensions. Different dimensions that are covered by the concept of success include survival, profit, sales growth and number of employees. Based on the findings from previous research, the factors affecting success of SMEs can be categorized into entrepreneur characteristics, enterprise or firm characteristics, management and know-how, customers and markets resources and finance (Swierczek and Ha, 2003), and external environment.

Researchers indicated that most of the core processes of human resource management; particularly recruitment and selection, performance appraisal, and training and development have significant positive impacts on success of small and medium scale enterprises The study of Keh, Nguyen and Ng (2007) reported a significant positive relationship between information utilization and success of the firm. With regards to age, a study by Reynolds et al. (2000) found that individuals ranging between 25 to 44 years old were the most successful entrepreneurs. In respect of business management experience, Kolvereid (1996) found that businesses that were run by entrepreneurs with prior entrepreneurial experience and creativity scored significantly higher success levels than those without such experience. Researchers classified small business success was classified into three (3) categories of antecedents; namely entrepreneur characteristics, firm characteristics and environmental characteristics. The entrepreneur characteristics covered age, education, managerial competence and industry experience. From the dimension of firm characteristics, factors that affect success of small and medium scale enterprises include length time an enterprise has been continuously operating, size of the enterprise, sector and source of capital and profitability of the firm McMahon (2001) found that enterprise size had a significant effect success of small and medium enterprises

In business life, success is a key term in the field of management, although it is not always explicitly stated. Success and failure can be interpreted as measures of good or indifferent management. The idea of success is often used to refer to a firm’s financial performance. There are at least two (2) important dimensions of success: 1) financial vs. other success; and 2) short- vs. long-term success. Hence, success can have different forms, e.g. survival, profit; return on investment, sales growth, number of employed, happiness, reputation, and so on. In other words, success can be seen to have different meanings by different people. In spite of these differences, people generally seem to have a similar idea of the phenomenon, i.e. of what kind of business is successful. Size of enterprise. Size of enterprise reflects how large an enterprise in employment terms. McMahon (2001) found that enterprise size significantly linked to better business performance. Larger enterprises were found to have a higher level of success.

Success in any human endeavors has closely been associated with the achievements of goals and objectives (Ngwangwama, Ungerer, and Morrison, 2013), however, success in business studies though crucial in managerial decision-making, firms especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are not able to explicitly document them. For a large proportion of authors, business success has been defined in terms of firm performance that is often characterized by such firm’s capacity to generate acceptable outcomes and actions. However, according to Mohammed et al. (2017), the use of firm performance to measure success comes with complications and can be interpreted from different dimensions. In general, the debate on business success indices has been limited to two (2) broad concepts: (i) economic (financial) and (ii) non-financial (non-pecuniary) success. Financial measures for business success or growth include return on assets, sales growth, profits, employee growth, and survival rates while non-pecuniary measures include intangible constructs such as customer satisfaction, personal development, achievement, corporate reputation, happiness, and market share (Islam et al., 2011). In this study, business achievement is used as a proxy for measuring business success The use of non-pecuniary measures for this study is as a result of the non availability of financial data from the small and medium scale enterprises in the study area to carry out analysis using the financial measures. It is as a result of the above that this study examined the effect of entrepreneur and firm characteristics on the Business success of small and medium scale enterprises in selected States in North Central, Nigeria. The specific objectives of the study are to: i. assess the effect of creativity on the Business success of small and medium scale enterprises in selected states in North Central, Nigeria.