Service and product innovation have been emphasized as being essential to the success of ICT firms in numerous studies. Being ongoing processes, R&D activities make it challenging to forecast the benefits to a business. Does the company obtain immediate returns on its research and development expenditures? How long will their effectiveness remain? During the development of a strategy, business managers must take all these factors into account. A major objective of this paper is to determine the relationship between a company’s R&D investment and its business performance. We collected data from 1262 small- and medium-sized enterprises in the ICT service industry in China between 2011 and 2020. The R&D investment was selected as the independent variable, while its financial performance (ROA, ROE, liquidity ratio, debt asset ratio, and interest cover ratio) and market value (Tobins’ Q) were selected as the dependent variables. Multiple linear regressions were used to determine whether there was a correlation between these variables. Firstly, R&D investment improve current profitability and there is a one-period lag in these benefits. Second, R&D is negatively correlated with short-term debt-paying ability, but positively correlated with a long-term view, and these effects will last for one period. Lastly, R&D investment has a negative impact on the current market value, but the R&D investment within the two lagged periods still has a positive impact. This study addresses a significant gap in empirical research. Recommendations for companies to consider when making R&D decisions are also included in the paper.

The study of business performance has a substantial impact on improving the internal management and economic performance of companies. By analysing the previous literature, this paper chooses to measure the factors affecting business performance at four levels, including R&D investment intensity, human capital, patents, and brand value. The purpose of the study is to find out whether these selected factors work equally well for small and medium-sized enterprises. The sample size was 846 Chinese small and medium enterprises from different industries. The firm performance indicators were ROA and ROE. The data has been collected through National Equities Exchange and Quotations platforms based on updated annual reports in 2019. Finally, a stepwise descriptive analysis and multiple linear regression were conducted and predicted the tendency of business performance. The analysis provided the linear combination of four independent variables (R&D, human capital, patents, and brand value) which are significantly related to the dependent variable (business performance). In conclusion, we found that there is a positive impact of patents and brand value on business performance. In detail, we concluded that only production and highly educated personnel show a positive influence. For R&D intensity, there is no strong connection could be observed. In practical terms, this paper allows SME firms to appreciate the importance of human capital, patents, and brand value.

It is of great theoretical and practical significance to introduce the supply chain concept into micro and small manufacturing enterprises and to build a cost management evaluation model for micro and small manufacturing enterprises based on the supply chain to improve the cost management of micro and small manufacturing enterprises. To this end, based on combing the relevant literature on supply chain and cost management evaluation at home and abroad, this paper analyzes the characteristics of cost management of micro and small manufacturing enterprises because of the problems of cost management of micro and small manufacturing enterprises, adopts the gray fuzzy hierarchical analysis method to assign and evaluate, which takes into account the nonindependence among the elements of each level and the elements of the same level, and also considers the characteristics of grayness and fuzziness of qualitative indicators so that the evaluation results are more credible. The evaluation of cost management of micro and small manufacturing enterprises based on the supply chain was carried out by using gray fuzzy analysis, and the empirical analysis was based on the research data of company B. The evaluation result was “poor,” which verified the applicability of the cost management performance evaluation model of micro and small manufacturing enterprises and indicated the direction for the improvement of cost management of micro and small manufacturing enterprises. And, the proposed intuitionistic fuzzy hierarchical analysis has greater advantages in evaluation accuracy than the traditional fuzzy hierarchical analysis.