Identification and Prioritization of Growth Strategies for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in "Gaz-e-Boldaji" Industrial Cluster

The aim of the present study is to identify and prioritize the growth strategies used by 74 active SMEs in "Gaze Boldaji" industrial cluster. In the first phase of the research, we used unstructured interviews with 10 managers of cluster and businesses in order to identify the strategies. In the second phase, we designed questionnaires based on the interviews to prioritize the strategies and were distributed among 58 of business executives. We used the available sampling to choose cluster managers, stratified random sampling to choose business managers and random sampling to distribute the questionnaires.For the analysis of the texts of interviews, the content method was used and for the analysis of the data derived from the questionnaires a single sample t-test and Friedman methods were used. The results showed that the strategy of "increasing sales", "development of public relations and information about products", "selling products in new areas" and "improvement of existing products," were the most frequently used strategies and the "focused strategy" was introduced as the first priority among the growth strategies in this cluster.