Financing Decisions in Equipment- and High-Cost-System- Dependent SMEs: The Roles of Timing, Contractual Rights, and Risk Exposure — Protocol for a Systematic Scoping Review

Registered protocol for a systematic scoping review (JBI methodology) on financing decisions in small and medium-sized enterprises whose core business depends materially on costly equipment or technological systems. The review maps how studies examine the timing of finance and system access, exercisable contractual rights (ownership, use, upgrade, exit and step-in), and the allocation of economic risk (debt, guarantees, downtime, obsolescence and residual value). The protocol defines a two-gate eligibility test (operational dependence and financial materiality), information sources (Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection), deduplication, blinded screening with an independent second reviewer, data charting, appraisal, evidence-and-gap mapping, pre-specified sensitivity analyses and reporting (PRISMA-P 2015, PRISMA-ScR, PRISMA-S).