AN ANALYSIS OF COMPETITIVENESS ADVANTAGE TRANSFORMATION OF SMALL MEDIUM ENTERPRISE COMMUNITY IN BANDUNG

Abstract

Abstract. Since the implementation of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2016, business traffic in Southeast Asian countries has become easier to enter Indonesia. Market potential is wide open, especially opportunities for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Indonesia. For this condition the SME community cannot do it alone, the role of government is needed to be able to compete and empower the SME community in the global market. The Bandung city government is one of the cities that has a specific strategy for the local SME community in Indonesia, which is planned to increase competitiveness in the global market, by creating a program called Little Bandung. This program has a main activity to carry out a strategy to promote SME community products (Kalantaridis, 2009) to domestic and international aimed at increasing the competitiveness of the SME community incorporated in Little Bandung. Analysing the efficiency and effectiveness of the program in providing support to improve competitiveness is being done, both in the form of media promotion strategies or business strategy transformation. Details about developing SME competitiveness in terms of production capacity, product certification, intellectual property rights, access to capital, sales turnover that will affect the quality of production are also discussed in this study. An observation was carried out by distributing questionnaires to 30 SMEs who were members of the Little Bandung community for the last two years, using quantitative methods and non-parametric descriptive approaches. This research successfully revealed the fact that Little Bandung's SME community program is a program that is needed by SMEs in the city of Bandung, is running very effectively and this program is considered to have been well implemented by the Bandung city government. In addition, SMEs that have joined the program have developed competitiveness in aspects of Intellectual property rights, ownership of halal certificates, sales turnover, the quantity of production and ease of access to capital. The opportunity to study for further research is to be able to measure the influence of the Little Bandung program on aspects of competitiveness potential from internal or external sides. The use of the conjoint analysis method or multilinear regression can be done to find out the community's preference for innovations by the Bandung city government in the Little Bandung SME community program as a new challenge and new perspective for the government to play a role in building the SME community.