Digital Transformation in SMEs: A Response to Crisis?

Dear colleagues,

Digital transformation (DT) has been recently recognized as a new approach that companies apply into directing their businesses, conceiving their interactions with different stakeholders (Bresciani, Ferraris, and Del Giudice, 2018). More precisely, DT is termed as a way that “a firm employs digital technologies, to develop a new digital business model that helps to create and appropriate more value for the firm” (Verhoef et al., 2019, p.1). In recent years, DT has affected various industries, sectors, and companies by developing digital resources, digital growth strategies, and by adopting emerging changes in internal organizational structure (Fakhar Manesh et al, 2020; Verhoef et al., 2019). Studies investigating the role of DT for SMEs have outlined the impactful role of information systems (Mohd Salleh, Rohde and Green, 2017) and digital platforms for SME initiation (Li et al., 2018), and the adoption of e-commerce by SMEs (Grandón, Nasco and Mykytyn, 2011).

In general, DT for SMEs constitutes implications of novel business opportunities and promotes innovative business models to address many issues, namely value creation and concerns related to SMEs’ readiness (Chonsawat and Sopadang, 2020). SMEs’ readiness regards the perception over the underlying conditions between SMEs and their partner cooperation. It is communication among the interdisciplinary/collaborative department and their employees/workers, and consequently, the management and organization strategies. In line with Chonsawat and Sopadang (2020), organizational resilience has been realized as one of the critical indicators of SMEs’ readiness in the latest stage of industrialization. Their study also outlines that DT is a significant aspect for bringing organizational resilience to fruition. 

Recently, COVID-19 has brought forth another crisis; thus, scholars, entrepreneurs, and people in the research industry are confronted with a brand-new global quest involving an economic and social impact (Ratten, 2020). While the learnings from the previous investigations on past crises could assist research on the current circumstances, almost all fields including entrepreneurship are faced with a new demand to acquire sufficient knowledge regarding this quite unusual phenomenon.

Several potential occasions are planned for research as follows:

• To explore the role of DT during COVID-19 and to realize how it could assist and/or damage the performance of SMEs significantly;
• To discover the features and competencies of SMEs that improved their conditions (Bourletidis and Triantafyllopoulos, 2014), also in comparison with larger organizations;
• To realize how DT supports organizational resilience challenges during and after a crisis.

References

1. Bourletidis, K., & Triantafyllopoulos, Y. (2014). SMEs survival in time of crisis: strategies, tactics and commercial success stories. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 148, 639-644.
2. Bresciani, S., Ferraris, A., & Del Giudice, M. (2018). The management of organizational ambidexterity through alliances in a new context of analysis: Internet of Things (IoT) smart city projects. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 136, 331-338.
3. Chonsawat, N., & Sopadang, A. (2020). Defining SMEs’ 4.0 Readiness Indicators. Applied Sciences, 10(24), 8998.
4. Grandón, E. E., Nasco, S. A., & Mykytyn Jr, P. P. (2011). Comparing theories to explain e-commerce adoption. Journal of Business Research, 64(3), 292-298.
5. Li, L., Su, F., Zhang, W., & Mao, J. Y. (2018). Digital transformation by SME entrepreneurs: A capability perspective. Information Systems Journal, 28(6), 1129-1157.
6. Fakhar Manesh, M., Pellegrini, M. M., Marzi, G., & Dabic, M. (2020). Knowledge management in the fourth industrial revolution: Mapping the literature and scoping future avenues. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. 68(1), 289-300.
7. Mohd Salleh, N. A., Rohde, F., & Green, P. (2017). Information systems enacted capabilities and their effects on SMEs' information systems adoption behavior. Journal of Small Business Management, 55(3), 332-364.
8. Ratten, V. (2020). Coronavirus (covid-19) and entrepreneurship: changing life and work landscape. Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship, 32(5), 503-516.
9. Verhoef, P. C., Broekhuizen, T., Bart, Y., Bhattacharya, A., Dong, J. Q., Fabian, N., & Haenlein, M. (2019). Digital transformation: A multidisciplinary reflection and research agenda. Journal of Business Research.

Mr. Mohammad Fakhar Manesh
Prof. Dr. Massimiliano Matteo Pellegrini
Prof. Dr. Vanessa Ratten
Guest Editors

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• digital transformation
• SMEs
• crisis
• COVID-19