The relationship between digital technologies and internationalisation. Evidence from Italian SMEs

ABSTRACT

The article empirically explores the role of e-business digital technologies in explaining the export propensity of Italian SMEs and focuses on the adoption and implementation of e-business technologies that enable firms to share information along the supply chain in order to take into account potential heterogeneities in paths of digitalisation. Our results, besides confirming the positive role of internet-based technologies already investigated in the current literature, show that e-business technologies have a positive impact on internationalisation only when they are embedded within process and organisational innovations and investments in digital skills have been made. This indirectly supports the argument that as the array of technological choices increases, the need for concurrent internal changes, as well as a detailed assessment of the connectedness between technological alternatives and specific business types, industries, or trading environment become increasingly important.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital technologies
• internationalisation
• export propensity
• innovation
• SMEs

SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION CODES:

• L23
• L60
• O33

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Accordingly, Hagsten and Kotnik (2017) estimated the proportion of post-upper secondary ICT-educated employees in addition to the Non-ICT educated ones..

Additional information

Funding

Ernesto Cassetta acknowledges support from the research program PRID, Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Udine.