Depicting E-business application adoption for small and medium enterprises (SMEs): The e-business triangle model

Abstract

Given the importance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to economic development, both academics and policy makers have been interested in measuring the progression of SMEs' e-business adoption. Numerous ebusiness “stage models” for SMEs have previously been proposed to track such progression. However, there remain a few issues with these models. Previous models tend to be too linear and prescriptive of certain e-business applications for SMEs. The problem with this is that SMEs do not necessarily adopt application in linear fashion and given the diversity of SMEs, some applications may not be relevant for some SMEs. In addition, most of these models tend to overlook secondary value chain activities that support an enterprise. We thus proposed a model that attempts to address these issues. The proposed model, called the e-business triangle model, attempts to depict SMEs' adoption of e-business in non-linear way and categorizes them into new groups of activities, namely support activities, primary activities, integrated activities and analytics activities. To apply the model, we conducted a personally administered survey in two industries, trade and services, depicting different e-business adoption patterns between them.