Differences in the Information Activity Monitoring from External Environment in Small and Medium Businesses: the influence of size and age

Abstract

This paper aims to study the scanning of strategic information from the external environment in small business and the relevance of this lies in the fact that the studies about scanning in small companies are still incipient in Brazil. It’s a survey study, with application of questionnaire to executives of 188 companies. In data analysis, we used the technique of analysis of variance of group means. The results indicated that small businesses prefer to scan some aspects from environment and were found major differences in the frequency of scanning in relation to the age of firms than in terms of size.