Academic Industry Links: the Myth of Taiwan Small and Medium Sized Enterprises Research

SMEs in Taiwan are widely regarded as the major factor contributed to the economic success of Taiwan. Although international SME research has been growing, Taiwan is not considered as a candidate for detailed investigation. More importantly, the indigenous research into Taiwan SME is rare. This paper aims at using the content analysis approach to examine the academic research into Taiwan SMEs and proposes a research agenda to develop an indigenous theory of Chinese SME in Taiwan and hence contribute to the present body of knowledge. A model, based on the previous work is developed to analyze the core SME issues, research purpose, general research approach, data collection methods and data analysis techniques of Taiwan SME research from a longitudinal perspective starting from 1984. In total 220 articles and postgraduate theses have been content analysed. The research concludes a few interesting findings that include: first, the SME publications are increasing every year and macro-issues play the most important role in the SME field. Second, research purpose of SME is quite average on all three research types. However, the research approach is more concentrate on empirical than non-empirical. The most popular data collection methods were quantitative survey. Finally, data analysis techniques were multivariate statistics. The research results also suggest that research into Taiwan SME should consider using the contextual stepwise approach (Siu and Kirby, 1999) to develop a model or theory for SMEs in Taiwan.