Winner: Irwin McGrawHill Outstanding Doctoral student paper
Associativeness:A SME’s succesfull strategy to foreign market
David G. Puyana, Sergio Arboleda University

ABSTRACT
In Colombia, the SMEs counts for the 96.4% of the total companies, 63% of the
employment and 45% of manufacturing production. However, they only count for less
than 20% of the total Colombian exports. Now, when the country is involved in the
globalization process, the internationalization of SMEs has become an import topic.

Notwithstanding, the benefits derived from exporting in an increasingly globalized
marketplace has not foresee by the mayority of the SMEs and the foreign trade path is
facing many obstacles. This paper, offers a comprehensive analysis of 156 business
owners answers about the possibility of the associativeness as the best strategy to solve
some of the barriers hindering the small business export development.