Start-up challenges in transition economies and "soft” tools to tackle them - Case of soft skills in Belarus IT sector

Entrepreneurship is of vital importance for a healthy economy and significant for creating new jobs. Entrepreneurship associated with small business is regarded as the key vehicle for the creation of new enterprises as it generates job growth and stimulates competition (Ball, 2005). Indeed, SMEs account for a large share of total enterprises and make significant contributions to real GDP growth, new job creation, and poverty reduction. In fact, most of the large corporations like Apple and Microsoft initially began as an SME and later evolved into a corporate titan (Ng and Kee, 2018).

Ng and Kee (2018) also point out, that previous studies dealing with the key factors of successful businesses have predominantly focused on large enterprises and multi-national corporations rather than SMEs, and empirical studies on owner-managed SMEs in the context of developing countries largely remain scarce and limited.