Abstract: The sub-optimal performance of small, micro and medium enterprises (SMMEs) has been a grave concern in African developing countries, where the triple challenges of high unemployment, poverty and inequality are rife. More so, while a growing body of entrepreneurship literature attributes the underperformance of SMMEs in developing countries to lack of innovation of these firms, this literature has focused substantially on large scale, urban based enterprises in the manufacturing and retail sectors. Consequently, despite the increasing value of rural based agricultural enterprises to the economies of developing countries, the role of innovation in the performance of rural-based SMMEs remain under-explored and ambiguous in literature. Therefore, this paper examines the role and contribution of innovation to the improvement of SMME performance. The thesis of this paper is that mindful of the agro-based nature of African economies, the ballooning population that domicile in rural areas coup

• Publication Date: 17-Nov-2014
• DOI: 10.15224/978-1-63248-052-1-130
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Abstract: This paper considers a supply chain consisting of one manufacturer and multiple retailers. The retailers can use transshipment as a recourse action to satisfy their unmet demands, and they base their inventory decisions on a fill rate constraint. We study the impact of transshipment on supply chain members' performance. We show that the impacts of transshipment are different under fill rate based inventory decisions from under profit-maximization based inventory decisions. In particular, when the retailers have only one purchasing opportunity, transshipment always hurts the manufacturer because retailers order less with transshipment. Further, the transshipment hurts the manufacturer more whenever the value of the transshipment for the retailers is high. On the other hand, for an infinite horizon case when retailers have multiple ordering opportunities, the retailers' expected ordering quantities remain unchanged with transshipment; however, the manufacturer still benefits from transsh

• Publication Date: 17-Nov-2014
• DOI: 10.15224/978-1-63248-052-1-131
• Views: 0
• Downloads: 0