Research on competitiveness and internationalisation of companies is a critical academic field. There are infinite numbers of studies which investigate how to improve SME competitiveness, the impact of SME internationalisation on innovation, SMEs international performance, or the digital transformation of SMEs. Innovation is decisive for market competitiveness and efficiency and some research show that European SME innovations can rarely be seen as pioneering or groundbreaking. My research focuses of domestic small and medium-sized enterprises. In some research, recurring success factors can be identified (Berényi & Deutsch, 2021). In my early research, I investigated the importance of the SME sector (Szanyi-Gyenes, Mudri & Bakosné Böröcz, 2015; Szanyi-Gyenes, 2019), factors of a successful international growth of a small company (Szanyi-Gyenes, 2017), later on the management and the management’s attitude in the company’s success (Szanyi-Gyenes & Almási, 2021), future competitiveness aspects of domestic companies from the internationalisation perspective (Marciniak et al., 2022), the digitalization factors of domestic companies from the internationalisation and competitiveness perspective (Szanyi-Gyenes & Almási, 2023) and the effects of internal barriers of domestic companies on competitiveness. The research model describe how the competitiveness, the internationalisation dimension, and the role of the company’s manager are linked. The role of leadership is crucial to success, the reason is that strategic orientation, recognition of growth options, resource management, creating a mission-friendly organisational structure are all leadership capacities in the SME sector. Results has shown that managers and employees of enterprises have a diverse perception and evaluation of the performance of their enterprise, and that the concept of success is more complex and contains elements based on perceptions. The manager’s attitude towards success significantly determines the strategic orientation of the ...
