E-business opportunities and challenges for SME's in Macedonia

This paper explores the potential of adoption and use of ICT in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Macedonia. In the paper we present preliminary results of a survey of around 60 SMEs. The purpose of the study is to explore the factors enabling or impeding the successful adoption and use of ICT by SMEs. The study investigates the types of ICT adoption and applications, the overall motivation for ICT investments, the advantages gained from ICT, the motive of using Internet and the difficulties in implementing ecommerce applications. We find that SMEs are generally satisfied with their investment in ICT but they are concerned about the cost of such investments and are uncertain about the business benefits, failing to recognize ICT’s strategic potential to increase business flexibility, to increase productivity and to support globalization. Besides the concern about the ICT related cost, other major obstacles in adopting ICT were lack of internal ICT capabilities and lack of information about selecting, implementing and evaluating suitable ICT and ebusiness solutions. Our findings have important implications for policy aimed at ICT and e-business adoption and use by SMEs and will provide a foundation for future research by helping policy makers to understand, assist and support the SME sector.