TY - CONF TI - Entrepreneurial Process of SMEs in Macau AU - Phillips, Jenny O. L. AU - Oliveira, Nelio T3 - ICEME 2022 AB - In recent years, entrepreneurship and innovation have been highly propagandised for Macau's economic development, diversification, and the Greater Bay Area (GBA). Since 2013, efforts have been exerted by the Macau government to encourage and support entrepreneurship, from the launching of the Young Entrepreneurs' Aid Scheme in 2013 and the Macau Young Entrepreneur Incubation Centre in 2015. While the failure rate of startups has been considered high in most parts of the world, the rate was only as low as 14% in Macau, with many businesses created every year. This research aims to study the unique entrepreneurial environment for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) starting up in Macau from the experience of local entrepreneurs who are benefactors of government support. In-depth interviews were conducted to understand the experience and perceptions of these entrepreneurs as they go through each stage of the entrepreneurial process. Existing research on entrepreneurial processes varies from the two-stage process, which focuses on the beginning of an enterprise, to the different models of various stages from ideas generation to exit or long-term development. From the consolidation of the literature on the entrepreneurial process, five key stages were taken to guide this qualitative research. Findings suggested that idea validation at the start of the entrepreneurial process is almost non-existent amongst our research subjects. Yet it does not affect the implementation and growth of these SMEs. The growth strategies tend to be steady and for the long term, with most SMEs having no consideration of an exit plan. C1 - New York, NY, USA C3 - 2022 13th International Conference on E-business, Management and Economics DA - 2022/11/30/ PY - 2022 DO - 10.1145/3556089.3556113 DP - ACM Digital Library SP - 563 EP - 568 PB - Association for Computing Machinery SN - 978-1-4503-9639-4 UR - https://doi.org/10.1145/3556089.3556113 Y2 - 2023/03/14/00:00:00 KW - Economic diversification KW - Entrepreneurial process KW - Government entrepreneurship aids ER -