Catalysis in decision making process of innovative SMEs' managers

Since the mid-80s, research on Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) has been growing faster than ever before. This trend is supported by the creation of specialized magazines, the organisation of international seminars and the development of academic research teams. This research has been focused on the specificity of small firms (Torrès : 1999) and especially on the crucial role played by the manager. Besides, decision making still remains a central action of SMEs' managers (Duchénéaut : 1996). During the past few decades, many researchers have developed decision making models such as Simon (1958), Bower (1970), Quinn (1980), Allison (1970) or March, Cohen and Olsen (1972). All these models have tried to explain the decision making process especially in big companies. So, they seem to be highly inadequate to smaller organizations such as SMEs. Despite the high personalization of decision making process in SMEs (Julien and Marchesnay : 1993), managers evolve under environmental contingencies. In this paper, we postulate that the starting phase of decision making process (Julien : 1997) is scarcely purely proactive or purely reactive, but probably between these two extreme situations. So, we suggest to describe this alternative way by introducing the concept of catalysis used in chemistry. In chemistry, catalysis is synonymous with acceleration phenomenon. Although decision speed seems to affect firm performance, there has been little research on that topic, except Huber (1990), Eisenhardt (1989,1992) and Véran (1991), to quote some authors. Moreover, analogical reasoning keeps on being marginal in management science although some authors really believe in its evocating power. "If we are to use the natural sciences, by way of analogies, to suggest languages for behavioral science, chemistry, and especially biological chemistry, would seem to provide more fruitful analogies than physics"(Simon : 1967). In this paper, we suggest a set of propositions based on an analogical transfer (Le Roy : 1999) from chemistry to management. The first part presents the propositions in terms of favorable structure and poisons. These propositions are illustrated, in the second part, by two case studies. The first one CHAUDRON is a good example of the successful action of a catalyst on a favorable structure. This structure consists of internal predispositions such as export activities, economic intelligence or intuition in decision. The second case BISTOURI points out the existence of internal and external poisons whose action blocks the decision making process despite the presence of a catalyst.