Learning scenarios and services for an SME: Collaboration between an SME and a research team

Abstract

This paper proposes learning scenarios and learning services to support collaboration between Small or Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and research teams. Successful SMEs take special care about constant improvement of their business processes. To do this, they act as learning organizations - they acquire new knowledge, facilitate the learning of all their employees, learn collectively, and use various approaches and tools to support learning processes within an organization. However, competition on the market and deadline pressures often reduce the time the employees can use to learn in their organizations. To this end, collaboration with research teams can provide useful guidance to learning SMEs. The paper discusses such collaboration between a specific SME and a specific research team, but the scenarios proposed can be easily generalized to other cases of collaboration between SMEs and research teams.