Support for Small Business, Its Perceived Influence on Project Success : A Study of Projects of Small Businesses in a Swedish Science Park

Enterprises of any size need to face different challenges which might be specific to their environment or their structure. Therefore, to overcome these barriers each company owner needs to take into consideration suitable ways through which the available and potential resources can be best use in dealing with the business context. By studding the specific context of small businesses with an entrepreneurial and innovative character, we try to address in this thesis one of the particular ways through which these type of companies can face challenges within their environment: by involving different categories of external support in their projects and business activities. While the need for capital, information and co-operation is growing along with the small business development, we also have chosen to focus our attention on three types of support infrastructures: finance, information and network. Then, each of these support aspects is analysed in connection with project critical success factors in order to establish a certain relevance that external assistance can have on project success.