RELATIONSHIP ANALYSIS OF COOPERATIVE FACTORS IN BUSINESS, SUSTAINABLE ENTERPRISE AND BUSINESS PERFORMANCE AMONG RURAL ENTREPRENEURS IN ONE DISTRICT ONE INDUSTRY PROGRAM

Kuala Terengganu is a district which located in east-coast of peninsular Malaysia that given more attention toward the development of rural enterprises who are operating in surrounding area. One District One Industry Program (ODOI) that implemented by the state government is intended to increase the income of rural enterprises as well as creating mutual responsibility and contributed to the better and sustainable business. However, the preliminary studies have founded that most of rural entrepreneurs who are operating in rural areas are less attention toward the essential of cooperation concept in developing the sustainability concept in ODOI program. Even, some of them are not really impress to know the impact of collaboration and sustainability factors toward their business performance. Hence, the objective of this study is to examine the effect of business cooperation toward the development of sustainable enterprise and business performance in SDSI in Kuala Terengganu. In order to achieve the objectives of this study, survey study through purposive sampling was selected to review 59 respondents from the total 2,249 rural entrepreneurs in Kuala Terengganu. The Pearson correlation coefficients was selected to analyze the relationship between cooperation - sustainable development (H1), sustainable development - business performance (H2) and cooperation - business performance (H3). This study was founded that most of rural entrepreneurs are concerned toward the importance of cooperation and sustainable development in developing their business performance, however, they are still lacking attentive toward the importance of cooperation in developing the sustainable development in their business. Hence, the findings of this study show that many rural entrepreneurs who are registered under ODOI program are not clearly understand the importance of cooperation and sustainable development factors in developing their business performance as well as highlighted in the objective of ODOI. As such, this study was able to imply the ODOI administrator in Kuala Terengganu to enhance the awareness of rural entrepreneur towards the importance of cooperation in developing sustainable industries and developing the business performance.