A Digital Capabilities Dataset From Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises in the Basque Country (Spain)

摘要

Sustainable competitiveness and growth of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) areincreasingly determined by their capability to make use of digital technologies [EU (EuropeanCommission), 2018b] and tie into a digital ecosystem (Pelletier and Cloutier, 2019). Surveys(Tarutea and Gatautis, 2014; Bouwman et al., 2019; Shettima and Sharma, 2020) prove that thedigitalization has a positive effect on the performance of SMEs. This includes dimensions suchas growth, market value, and profitability as well as social and environmental performance andsatisfaction; 46% of firms that participated in a survey of the European Digital TransformationScoreboard report a medium-to-large increase in their annual turnover over the last 3 yearsfollowing the adoption of technology [EU (European Commission), 2018a]. Many SMEs, however,are lagging behind in digital transition (OECD, 2017). According to a report by the DigitalInnovation Hubs Working Group (2018), only 17% of SMEs have successfully integrated digitaltechnologies into their businesses, compared with 54% of large companies. They lack resources andcapabilities or suffer from inertia, which hampers opportunities (Cenamora et al., 2019). In theemerging highly interconnected and collaborative forms of value creation, the capacity to connectbetter to an integrated business network will be important to stay competitive (Rehm and Goel,2017; EU (European Commission), 2014).