Skills Management

5Developing Employees’ Entrepreneurial Competencies: the Resultant Changes for SMEs

Entrepreneurial dynamism is an essential component of competitiveness among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in their defense of competitive advantages over one another and is essential in combating the potential stagnation of their habits [BAS 09]. To exist in a competitive environment presupposes that they subscribe to a view encouraging innovation and measured risk-taking. They must make the most of their resources, starting with their employees, by exploiting their technical skill but also their entrepreneurial potential. Within a company, all employees possess capacities and skills hitherto undiscovered [DUR 06]. If it is expected of a welder to exercise the technical skill for which he has been recruited, he may also possess abilities potentially capable of feeding into the entrepreneurial dynamic of the SME, by putting forward improvements on the current model or new ideas. If making the most of the creativity of each employee seems appealing, as demonstrated by Google or 3M, to do this in SMEs is no simple task. To reintegrate an entrepreneurial dynamic in its functioning, its strategy, as well as in its daily implementation, implies the necessity of defining the skills to be acquired and the method by which these skills must be learnt, of thinking about the entrepreneurial self-expression of employees and forming a new idea of the scope of their work: which organizational changes ...