A shared ICT infrastructure for Indian SME clusters

The Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSME) sector is one of the fastest growing industrial sectors all over the world. Clusters of small and medium enterprises have been very successful worldwide in promoting their growth. The contributions of MSME clusters to Indian economy in terms of increasing manufacturing capacities, increasing exports, employment generation etc. have been widely studied. The success of these clusters is largely due to the individual small firms of the cluster closely collaborating and sharing resources. Sharing is the theme of our paper, where we focus on understanding how productivity and efficiency of an SME cluster in developing region can be improved by furthering collaboration among its units. The hypotheses of our study were that (a) there exists limited sharing and collaboration through informal networks among SME cluster units in India, (b) these clusters could be more productive by improving the collaboration among cluster actors, and (c) the sharing and cooperation within the cluster can be improved with formal networks among the cluster entities. To validate our hypotheses, we undertook a field study of the SME jeans cluster in Bellary, Karnataka. In this paper, we have put forth our findings from the study, followed by a proposal of an affordable ICT infrastructure solution to increase collaboration and hence productivity of the enterprises in Indian SME clusters.