Digital Divide and SMEs

There is a growing interest in how the digital divide affects the operations of SMEs. The digital divide among businesses is defined as the disparity between the effective use of ICT for gains in productivity (Wielicki, 2008). Often, SMEs are found to be on the wrong side of this divide, with insufficient funds and/or access to ICT as the most cited reasons for falling behind big corporations. A further common barrier to the use of ICT is cited as the lack of education and training. A study conducted on micro and small-sized enterprises (SMEs) from selected regions in Spain, Portugal and Poland on the use of ICT produced interesting results. It was found that the main barrier to the utilization of ICT and e-Business, and thus the main reason why SMEs struggle with the digital divide, is not so much the lack of access to IT as the