Regional SME and Development Agencies

Abstract

In Chapter 2, the author shared research evidence on the role of regional SME and development agencies, which are profiled as factors of SME support, regional development, and improvement of competitiveness. The author inquires whether it is possible to experiment with new institutional concepts with a basic role given to the agencies as facilitators of social-economic development reaching out locally, regionally, globally, and in particular, rurally. Such institutions have as their substance a series of development interventions that flow and merge into each other without sharp divisions that might inhibit entrepreneurship and, as will be seen later, rural development. What is proposed here is not a new institution as such but, rather, a new fashion of using the existing development infrastructure. The author develops this approach as experimentation with institutions, which is meant mainly to provide an insight into the fragmentary function of the common social-economic development rather than to propose a totally new method of developing an economy at the local and rural level.