Sustaining the introduction of innovation in digital enterprises Challenges and demands from Small Medium Enterprises in the Italian Northeast region

摘要

Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) face specific challenges as the pace of technological advancement quickens. In order to keep pace with market demands, these SMEs need, among others, new tools to manage information content and new problem solving skills. They also need personnel capable to analyse the new tools and methodologies, select the most appropriate, deploy the solutions and train their workforce. Larger corporations can relay on the presence of various skills within the company to create successful teams; they can afford external consultants to assist the change management, and broadly based training programs, while SMEs cannot. In this paper we analyse and discuss specific challenges and demands from Italian North-East SMEs as they have emerged from our experience in research and internship projects. We present some interesting case history data and discuss some general trends emerging from them. In particular we see that the type of problem in SMEs are not very different to the one encountered in large companies: they are of the same class, and the challenge here is to face efficiently these problems with limited resources.