21 September, 2003
These studies have been gathered by the Beep project, and further analysis of these studies and more can be found on the Beep Knowledge System. The menu on the left indicates the various areas covered by the case studies. The menu on the right links directly to the case studies in Digital SMEs.
Digital SMEs Cases
© Beep Knowledge System and case owners, 2002-2003
What is a digital SME?
A Digital SME is an SME that exploits ICT to its full potential in a holistic manner, e.g. changing products and services, changing markets, changing relationships with customers, new types of value chain and forms of cooperation and alliance, new organisational and management configurations, new ways to manage knowledge, etc.
There are three sub-cateories
- an SME whose products and services are predominantly digital;
- an SME which uses digital methods as the primary means of carrying out core operations - marketing, sales, service etc., e.g. a pure dot.com;
- an SME that exploits the benefits of digital methods to a significant extent.
The focus is on SMEs best practices in exploiting the opportunities provided by ICT to improve performance.
Attention is devoted to SMEs evolution and to the “external” factors, related to “digital economy”, that directly affect SMEs success and development. This focus will result in addressing:
- Structural changes in SMEs organisation and management
related to the impact of digital economy
- Changes in the competitive scenario that may affect
the SMEs evolution
- Interventions and policy instruments that have contributed to foster the SMEs adaptation to digital economy.
The analysis will consider both single business units and networks of SMEs. In fact, the networks, both informally and formally defined, are important organisations for the small companies and several experiences (such as the industrial clusters) show that networking is a successful way to improve SMEs competitiveness.
The definition of SME is based on the EU quantitative
parameters: employment, assets and turnover (i.e. any company with less
than 250 employees).