Identify barriers to small business in Canada and propose policies to sustain growth due to three key reasons: (a) small businesses are the driver of economic growth, forming 87% of Canada’s total businesses and 25% of total value of export goods worth $68 billion, (b) they sustain the Canadian economy with the highest growth in export value by 20% in the last decade when big firms declined by 20%, and (c) their growth is impeded by Canada’s slipping rank in global competitiveness from top 10 to 14h in the last two years. As the performance of small firms is influenced by the nation’s global competitiveness, the author proposes an approach to identifying the barriers by replicating and validating the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual survey of 16 business barriers in over 140 nations, reported in the WEF’s global competitiveness reports. The WEF’s sample comprises an average of 98 firms per nation of unspecified
firm size. This research samples 316 small firms to identify the rankings and relevance of the 16 barriers and match them against Canada’s 12 pillars of global competitiveness to develop policies that promote small business growth and sustainability. This methodology puts in evidence for the first time the validation of the WEF’s 16 barriers to business, not tested anywhere previously but critically important among small firms, the economic spine of a nation. The top five barriers were found uniquely different from WEF’s rankings: tax rates, tax regulations, access to financing, Poor Work Ethic and restrictive labour regulations. Chi-square and independent sample tests found respective significant associations and differences between barriers and business categories, provinces and data collection methods, which further help highlight the respective barriers specific to each demographic variable. The outcomes of the research provide implications for focusing resources in dismantling barriers by type of business, employee size and province, and strengthening weak pillars in global competitiveness to sustain long-term growth for small firms. Abiding by the United Nation’s Principles for Responsible Management, this research helps build a model of knowledge management for decision makers to monitor and analyse relevant data sources, design and implement policies to promote 60 small business sustainability. This research will provide the stimulus among academic scholars, industry captains and government leaders to collaborate for a better economic future and a more globally competitive nation.
Keywords – small business, barriers, sustainability, knowledge management, policies.

To sustain growth in turbulent environments SMEs face major challenges due to their limited human, organizational and financial resources and capabilities. How to reconcile learning and growth to sustain competitive advantage of SMEs in turbulent environments is a vital but widely unsolved question in theory and practice. Based on a three year action research project with 124 SMEs in Germany drivers and obstacles of growth have been identified and the methodology “Learning to grow” has been developed and successfully applied in further learning networks of SMEs in Germany, Spain , Argentina, Brazil and Peru. This methodology puts in evidence the effectiveness of project based learning to sustain and develop growth capabilities of SMEs. Aligning learning of teams with business challenges creates measurable short or mid-term results as well enhances organizational capabilities to sustain growth. Evaluations carried-out demonstrate that the learning projects let to significant business results (for example conquering new markets, adding new services to products, improving processes, productivity and quality) as well as enhancing organisational capabilities amongst which are improved team work, better problem solving, enhanced communication , freeing of owners or managers from daily routine tasks, development of leadership capabilities of middle managers, entrepreneurial thinking of employees.
Keywords – SMEs, growth, turbulent environment, project learning, dynamic capabilities

Due to the small size and to the high level of labour division, small firms in Industrial Districts need to establish horizontal and vertical cooperative relationships (Camuffo and Grandinetti, 2011; Malberg and Maskell, 1999) in order to share and combine complementary knowledge assets. Whilst the network approach (Granovetter 1985; Powell, 1991) has greatly contributed to the understanding of knowledge exchange processes in IDs and of their influence on performances, research on small firms’ networks has mostly assumed the network structure as a given. According to this gap, the purpose of the paper is to answer to the following research questions: is knowledge complementariness among firms in an industrial district a sufficient condition to let supply networks to emerge? What is the effect of relational embeddedness in determining the structural properties of these networks? We adopt an approach grounded on complexity science and consider the Industrial District as a Complex Adaptive System (Holland, 2002). The methodology used in the research is the agent-based simulation. We present an agent-based model of a stylized ID and build on it a virtual laboratory in which we perform generative experiments (Epstein and Axtell, 1996), in order to answer to the above research questions. In the literature on firms’ networks, topological works study how specific network structure influence the intensity of knowledge flows among a network’s firms. Our perspective is dual to the topological one: by not assuming that links among firms are pre-existent our objective is to generate the network topology with the help of an agent-based computational laboratory. Our contribution would be on different aspects: 1) we would explore how knowledge exchange processes can generate the emergence of network structures; 2) we analyse this topic in the context of small firms’ clusters, taking into account the crucial role that social characteristics of these systems play in shaping the phenomenon of network emergence; 3) the paper aims at contributing to the literature stream of dynamic emergence and evolution of supply networks, with a specific focus on the impact of collaborative strategies of agents on the emergent structures of networks. Main results of simulation experiments show that for every experimental set a stable network of links emerges among firms of the simulated ID. In addition, through the generative experiments we are able to identify certain conditions under which the emerged networks exhibit a hub&spoke structure. The model here proposed is not a case-based model, but an ideal-typical computational model, aimed at exploring and identifying a micro-macro relationship that could be applied to a class of empirical cases. As a consequence, the present research does not request, at this stage, a strict relation between the model and the empirical reality. The simulation is devoted to produce research hypotheses to be tested further using traditional methodologies. As this empirical validation process will be completed, the computational laboratory that has been presented in this paper could be used as a tool to support policy analysis e policy making decision processes.