Samenvatting

A Chinese colleague of mine said to me the other day: “You’re an old man!” I was really hurt by this remark, because first of all do I not feel old and secondly, there are things that I would definitively not like to hear from a young woman. My colleague on her part probably wondered why my reaction was so reserved; in her view she had just made me a huge compliment. In Chinese tradition, age has a very positive value, while in my European environment it is rather seen as an insult (Seelmann-Holzmann 2004: 7). Research executed among Dutch entrepreneurs in SMEs in five industrial sectors (Braaksma 2005, Vonk 2006), had a sequel in August 2006. In cooperation with the Fachhochschule Gelsenkirchen/Bocholt a similar research was set up on the basis of an equal number of interviews in German kleinere- und mittelständische Unternehmen (KMU) in the same five industrial sectors. The research question for this research was the same as in the Netherlands: ‘What requirements do SME-entrepreneurs set for business school graduates that need to perform internationally?’ (Braaksma 2005).