Sustaining SMEs competitive advantage: How significant is the role of service provider

Abstract

The exploration and discussion of this paper are expected to provide an understanding of the relationship between the service provider roles towards sustaining entrepreneurial competitive advantage among the Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the state of Terengganu. The paper further expected to generate certain degree of generalization of the SMEs operators from the investigation through the use of quota sampling, where 260 respondents were selected from seven (7) districts. The three (3) independent variables concerning capital, knowledge and promotion were used for testing the relationship towards sustaining entrepreneurial competitive advantage. For the purpose of elucidating the data from respondents, closed-ended question was formulated. The question was divided into A, B and C where each section contained 11, 12 and 29 respectively. The finding of the study revealed that all the selected predictors found to be significantly correlated with the strategies of sustaining entrepreneurial competitive advantage. One of the interesting evidence which highlighted in this study centers on the need to address the importance of designing different strategies that can strengthen the competitive advantage of the SMEs based on gender and the age category of the business operators.