A Google Research Award to a Project on SMEs' Digitization

THREE SDA BOCCONI SCHOLARS WANT TO SWITCH THE FOCUS OF DIGITIZATION POLICIES FROM TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION TO THE DIGITIZATION OF BUSINESS PROCESSES AND RELATIONSHIPS

A SDA Bocconi School of Management research project has won one of the 110 Google Research Awards for 2014, a competitive tender open to universities from all over the world. United We Stand, Divided We Fall: developing a comprehensive framework for networked digitization policies for SMEs (Francesco Saviozzi, Gianluca Salviotti and Federico Visconti) builds on the idea of switching the focus of SMEs digital transformation policies from general technology adoption to “networked digitization”, i.e. the digitization of relationships and transactions connecting key stakeholders outside and inside companies.
 
“While traditional policies dealing with infrastructural development, tax-based and financing based incentives and support to education turned out to be less effective than expected”, Saviozzi says, “recent experiments at the European level digitizing the relationships between companies in specific sectors provide firms with direct business incentives to further their efforts in exploiting digital technologies and show promising results. When whole processes are digitized, opting out is not an option”.
 
The first, promising results suggest the need to investigate the conditions under which such policies may be successful, depending on the specific economic sector. SDA Bocconi School of Management scholars want to build a model to assess the networked digitization potential of SMEs inside their cluster, based on a set of predisposing conditions (including business interdependency and density of relationship), potential outcomes (productivity, flexibility etc.) and major opposing forces. The framework will then be tested in selected Italian economic clusters and the outcomes of the tests will determine general policy guidelines for networked digitization.

by Fabio Todesco