The Balanced Scorecard in Large Firms and SMEs: A Critique of the Nature, Value and Application

During the last two decades, the use of the BSC has been widely spread in all sectors such as manufacturing and services; small and large firms; public and private sector. The idea of this paper is to investigate the contribution made by the Balanced Scorecard in both large firms and SMEs. This paper critiques the Balanced Scorecard from different points of view such as generations of the BSC, performance measures used, benefits of using BSC, scope of BSC, the design of BSC and strategy deployment. Finally, these different points of view were analyzed in order to reflect the implementation and application of BSC in large firms and SMEs.