Economic Growth, Increasing Productivity of SMEs, and Open Innovation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I think the authors have done good job in the revision. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

In advance we would like to thank you for the suggestions given to us to improve our previous article. We hereby summit our additional articles in the discussion section (pages 28-32). Thank you for the suggestion and input.

Regard,

Author 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors followed the recommendations and made great improvements compared to the previous version. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

In advance we would like to thank your for the suggestions given to us to improve our previous articles. We hereby summit our additional articles in the discussion section (pages 28-32). Thank you for the suggestion and input.

Regard,

Author

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I have enjoyed reading this paper that addresses an important and interesting theme. It is well written and documented and the methodology is explained clearly. 

I only have two observations:
(1) In the Discussion section the authors should also bring arguments for the relevance of the results obtained by correlating them with similar recent studies in the field.
(2) In the Conclusion section the authors link back to the objectives and the outcomes, but they should also present the limitations of the study and areas of future research. 

Good luck!

Reviewer 2 Report

I think the paper is really difficult to be followed by a reader. The authors are elaborating on issues that it is not necessary to do so. The English language needs some copy-editing services because the text is difficult in reading and there are many grammatical errors.

However, the main problem is there are not clear arguments and aims. Even from the abstract, one can see that the paper investigates many issues not related with each other: a) the role of growth and innovation on entrepreneurial productivity, b) the effect of government policies, business capital support, and human resource capacity on the development of SMEs, c) effects of direct and indirect effects of economic growth, technological innovation, and business diversification on product marketing and the stability of SMEs, d) strategies to increase business productivity and the sustainability of the community's economic enterprises in Makassar City. In my opinion these are four distinct issues that should be analyzed in depth in separate manuscripts and not all in one.

Introduction needs rewriting. The authors need to clearly present the scope of the paper and its contribution in the relevant literature.

Research architecture needs reorganization and rewritting as well. This is not clear what data are used as well as how these data are obtained. There is not a clear strategy of selecting the database used in the analysis and it not clear how the authors proceed with analyzing their data.

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review your manuscript entitled “Economic Growth, Technological Innovation, and Community Economic Business Sustainability of Makassar City, Indonesia.” I appreciate the amount of work that the author(s) have put into this manuscript, but was disappointed at the lack of focus and broad generalities taken by the author(s). I hope that the comments that I have made prove to be constructive and help the authors further refine their manuscript.

1. Overall, the writing style and grammar are good and I appreciate the use of the Oxford comma. However, the manuscript is laborious to read as the author(s) writing style is rather verbose and should be more concise. For example, in the first sentence, the author(s) state: “Development policies that are oriented towards regional economic growth supported by the use of technology will accelerate and encourage increased productivity in economic enterprises developed in the community.” This is 28 words long when it could be stated much more succinctly.
2. The introduction is does not adequately explain why we need this study. Keep it simple. Provide a brief introduction, describe what has been done, what has not been done, what you are doing, and a short summary of how your study contributes to the literature. You should be able to articulate all of this in 5 paragraphs at the most. That’s all you need.
3. Each of the study’s research questions could easily be a separate paper unto itself. Your research questions should be generalizable and should not include Makassar City as part of the question (e.g., Q1 and Q4). Makassar City is the research context in which you will study the broader research questions.
4. Other than the paper being about Makassar City (which should be relegated to the background as the research context), this manuscript suffers from a lack of focus. Are you studying innovation, economic growth, sustainability, COVID-19? If you are studying all of them, you can’t do any one of them justice. I am not convinced that the author(s) have adequately examined each element of their research framework.
5. The author(s) state many statistics without proper citations. For example, on line 148 the author(s) state: “…experienced a sharp decline from a growth rate of 8.79% to 2.8% during the second quarter…” without citing the source of this statistic. Please properly cite the sources of your statistics throughout the manuscript.
6. Please use a comma with numerals over 999. For example, you state on line 301 “The number of SMEs in the developing city of Makassar was 2683…” 2683 should be 2,683. Please correct this issue throughout the manuscript.
7. In Table 1, you don’t need to report those figures to 2 significant digits (or in some cases 3 significant digits).
8. The author(s) own process of combining qualitative and quantitative approaches has an item for research hypothesis, yet no hypotheses are proposed or tested in this study.
9. The author(s) haven’t adequately described or presented their regression and path model results. Where are the tables showing your results? Did you check for goodness of fit in the path models? Did you check for multicollinearity in the regressions? Where is your correlation table? How did you come up with your survey questions? How did you validate them?
10. So, you’ve done this study and found some interesting results, but so what? What are the implications of this study? What have you contributed to knowledge that we didn’t already know? How have you extended prior research? This needs to be more clearly stated.
11. No study is perfect. You need to articulate the limitations of your study.

 

Academic research is a discussion. I hope that the suggestions that I have made do not discourage the authors, but rather serve to help guide them to improve their manuscript further.