“E-commerce and cultural innovation in small and micro sized enterprises: a preliminary investigation”

Abstract The role played by small- and medium-sized enterprises in economic growth and development in Europe is officially recognised, both in economic literature and in official European Community documents. The study analysed 428 crafts industries and was aimed at disclosing the instruments and structural elements of entrepreneurial culture in small and medium-sized businesses, especially in order to look at the utilization of information system and e-commerce by the crafts firms. Chi Square test was used in the descriptive statistics of the results (p <.05). The descriptive data revealed that only 44% of the interviewed enterprises are used to rely upon information systems, while 51% is devoid of any information systems and the remaining 5% declared the intention to use, in future, information systems. Regarding the specific application of the IT (Information Technology), shipping and correspondence (74%) and book-keeping (49%) represent the business areas more “computerized”, while the sector where information system results less applied is that of planning and control (15%). The use of internet as business and marketing instrument is almost completely ignored: only 18% of the enterprises use e-mail for communication with suppliers and clients and only the 10% of these latter enterprises have an individual web site. Only 5% of the enterprises are used to carry out purchases on-line and only 1% sells their respective products and/or services through the internet. As compared to the past years, the intention of giving more importance to innovation is emerging as a general trend of craft enterprises, and in particular there seems to be an association between the perception of the importance of the innovation, participating at trade fair, and the magnitude of investments in personnel training and IT.