SMEs are widely recognized as an important driving force of economic growth, yet, their uptake of ICT is still very low. To support SMEs ICT adoption and to foster regional development, in 2000, the Lisbon Strategy on the Information Society and Knowledge-based economy created a vision for 2010 towards the creation of the European Digital Business Ecosystems (DBE). This paper is positioned with...

Smallto medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often lack the resources and knowledge to strategically adopt information and communication technologies (ICTs). Governments across the world have acknowledged this issue by designing intervention programs aimed specifically at the SMEs sector. Recent research on government intervention in SMEs’ ICT adoption has tended to focus on the role of technologica...

The Web offers a powerful tool for knowledge-sharing among small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Such online initiatives have, however, frequently been unsuccessful. This paper examines factors motivating SMEs to share knowledge online. It reports data from a telephone survey of 192 SME members of two successful regional business networks comprising members from diverse industries. Althoug...

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) play a vital and pervasive role in the current development of Taiwan’s economy. Recently, the application of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have enabled large enterprises to have direct contact with their clients via e-commerce technology, which has led to even fiercer competition among the SMEs. This study develops and tests a theoretical m...

The adoption of the Internet as a business strategy tool is becoming an important way for firms to expand their business through innovative strategies. This study provides an insight concerning the factors that influence the adoption of the Internet to support business activities, also known as e-business among SMEs in Malaysia. In addition, the study also examines the relationship between e-bu...

Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) lack an adequately skilled workforce and managers, since university education generally focuses on large enterprises and their needs. Complementary skills needed by SMEs have been of lesser interest even though several approaches, methods and environments could be utilized. For example, enterprise resource planning systems, business simulation games and ...

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have played a vital role in technology innovation and development of national economy throughout the world. To be competitive and to react faster to the market demands, SMEs need new information processing techniques to analyze the increasing amount of produced data, and innovative solutions in order to manage the computational resources with better flexibili...

ERP systems are more and more adopted in large companies. It seems that this trend is followed by small and medium companies too. We have conducted a questionnaire based survey to identify how Swiss SMEs perceive this phenomenon. The sample size is 687 of which 125 have actually implemented an ERP. Our main findings are twofold. First SMEs that have not implemented ERP invoke concerns (e.g. cos...

Being able to control logistics on the network level demands transparency to inventory and deliveries in the whole supply network. However, the information technology (IT) solutions enabling network transparency are expensive and heavy to install and, thus, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) often find them infeasible. This paper brings forth the difficulties small and medium sized enter...

The present paper focuses on the topics of “Collaborative Working Environments”, “eBusiness-Future forms of organisations, Technology and Applications” and “Semantic and Knowledge based systems”. It is based mainly on the Collective project Know Construct (COLL-CT-2004-500276) starting in March 2005. The main objective of the project is to develop a common internet-based platform for SMEs and o...