Ramesh Kumar Ayyasamy

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are considered to be the world’s largest. They play a vital role as they create jobs and improve the living conditions of their local communities as they contribute to the country’s GDP growth. Due to their contributions to the nation’s economy, they have been given much attention in entrepreneurship. This paper aims to study the impact of entrepreneurial education and entrepreneurial competencies on small and medium enterprises’ performance. Entrepreneurship is a vital component of any successful business strategy. It can be used to overcome the uncertainties of today’s business environment. The roles of these two independent factors in the business environment are also more relevant to small businesses. The goal of this paper is to develop a framework that explores the performance of firms from the perspective of their entrepreneurial education and entrepreneurial competencies. The proposed framework aims to provide a comprehensive view of the factors that influence the performance of businesses. It shows that entrepreneurial education is the antecedent of competencies that can affect firm performance, where entrepreneurial competencies is treated as a mediating variable. In addition, this study explores the role of entrepreneurial education and entrepreneurial competencies in developing financial and non-financial business performance. The framework is based on the resource-based view, a constantly applied approach to the small business context to utilize strengths and weaknesses to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. The paper provides valuable insights into the entrepreneurial factors that businesses can consider when enhancing their performance. It also helps entrepreneurs in developing their entrepreneurial education and competencies to increase their chances of achieving better results in their businesses which in return can help to reduce the number of business failures and thus, boost the country’s economy.