Summary: Factors Influencing SME

4. Factors influencing SME´s internationalization
International activity can help SMEs to upgrade their human and technological capital in order to meet the demands of clients, while increasing productivity. It would be important to illustrate how SME’s represent an important link to global value chains, in order to understand how important it is to overcome the current barriers and to include this sector in the international movement of good/services .
SME´s are the biggest sector ¨feeding¨ larger enterprises so they can offer the world certain products/services. They are present in what we call the fourth, third and second tier in global supply chains, whether of large businesses or governments, what gives them a status as experts in intermediate

It´s important to mention one factor that is related to the issue of maintaining that presence, called the lasting excellence. Gary Harpst on his book “Six disciplines for excellence”, mentions how on his experience in working with many types of SMEs he had identified six fundamental barriers to excellence that, if not addressed on an ongoing and systematic basis, will cause organizational performance to decline : Poorly understood strategy, weak strategy execution, unchecked organizational entropy, lack of a systematic approach, impractical implementation methods and people are not engaged. For purposes of this thesis, we decided to merge the first two barriers that we believe are the most important when it comes to becoming

The most traditional way of getting access to capital is through the banks; but, as mentioned by Gian Maria Gros-Pietro, Chairman of Intesa Sanpaolo Group, when you look at SMEs from a bank´s perspective, it´s important to mention that there are more costs and higher risks, when expanding to new markets, compared to larger firms. The main issues that stops or delays banks from lending large amounts of capital to SMEs have to do with their size, limited assets and their general inability to raise funds through credit markets or publicly trading equity . Banks are moving away from lending to SMEs, this is why there is the need to find alternative funding to fill the gaps. So, if banks are not the main source of capital lending, how are SMEs getting access to finance?
To solve this barrier, there are new innovative ways that have been created to help SMEs get the necessary money to internationalize. Some local and/or regional examples that could be interesting to take