A Framework for Supporting the Creation and Development of SMEs

Today, supporting & development of SMEs is one of major priorities of each country’s developing plans. Although these enterprises need less investment but have more outputs and play a key role in innovation, entrepreneurship & increasing share of country’s exports. SMEs play as a motor of growth in the countries in knowledge based economy era. So in most countries, various laws & facilities has been developed for supporting SMEs. In our country, supporting the development of SMEs have a special position in country’s development plans and article 21 and article 39 have a direct refer to support the development of SMEs. In this way, government has to design and implement special supportive plans for SMEs. But until now, there is no complete, efficient & effective model to support SMEs in the country. Thus, this paper by focusing in this challenge, tries to introduce a framework to present a support plan for SMEs. This article has a whole literature review on SMEs and beside the quantitative definition of SMEs, introduces qualitative definition of them. Then in this paper we analyze available trends and models in context of planning and developing processes for SMEs, and recognize factors which affect this process and on the base of the best practices of EU for SMEs, introduce a functional framework for planning, supporting & development of SMEs.