Search results

Organisational resilience and digital maturity both explain how some organisations are better able to cope with unexpected disruptions. However, research exploring the relationship between these two concepts, and their role in addressing exogenous shocks, remains sparse. This study first aimed to compare digitally mature SME retailers’ organisational resilience with that of digitally less mature SME retailers and then investigate further how their digital maturity impacted their response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors adopt an explanatory two-phase mixed-method research design, with online surveys from 79 SME retailers in South Africa, followed by interviews.

Digitally mature SMEs exhibited higher levels of organisational resilience, specifically with respect to situational awareness, management of keystone vulnerabilities and adaptive capacity. The authors also demonstrate that digital leadership is a greater driver of organisational resilience than digital capabilities.

The authors suggest ways for SME retailers to develop their digital maturity, particularly their digital leadership, to increase their organisational resilience.

This paper makes a case for SME retailers to focus on building their digital maturity to better cope with and learn from unexpected events. In particular, digital maturity is positively associated with SME retailers’ innovation and creativity and their devolved and responsive decision-making.

Information systems' security is more critical than ever before since security threats are rapidly growing. Before putting in place information systems' security measures, organizations are required to determine the maturity level of their information security governance. Literature review reveals that there is no recent study on information systems' security maturity level of banks in Ethiopia. This study thus seeks to measure the existing maturity level and examine the security gaps in order to propose possible changes in Ethiopian private banking industry's information system security maturity indicators.

Four private banks are selected as a representative sample. The system security engineering capability maturity model (SSE-CMM) is used as the maturity measurement criteria, and the measurement was based on ISO/IEC 27001 information security control areas. The data for the study were gathered using a questionnaire.

A total of 93 valid questionnaires were gathered from 110 participants in the study. Based on the SSE-CMM maturity model assessment criteria the private banking industry's current maturity level is level 2 (repeatable but intuitive). Institutions have a pattern that is repeated when completing information security operations but its existence was not thoroughly proven and institutional inconsistency still exists.

This study seeks to measure the existing maturity level and examine the security gaps in order to propose possible changes in Ethiopian private banking industry's information system security maturity indicators. This topic has not been attempted previously in the context of Ethiopian financial sector.

This paper aims to assess the direct effects of antecedents of initial trust, the mediating effect of trust and the moderating effect of demographic variables on non-adopters’ behavioral intention to use mobile banking.

The study tested the models of theory of reasoned action and theory of planned behavior to evaluate potential antecedents of trust (diffusion of trust, infrastructure quality, perceived costs, privacy and security) moderators (demographic variables) and mediators (initial trust) that will influence behavioral intention to use mobile banking. The Hayes’ Process Macro developed by Andrew F. Hayes (2013) was used as a statistical analysis in SPSS to estimates the path coefficients using multiple regression. The tool provides insights on the direct and indirect effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable through the existence of moderating variables and mediation variables.

The results show that the non-adopters of mobile banking asserted that the antecedents of initial trust played a significant influence on behavioral intention to use online banking services.

There is a dearth of literature addressing mobile banking in the Philippines. The first initial trust formation in internet banking using computer workstations and laptops in the Philippines was conducted by Chiu et al. (2016). This research fills in the gap by expanding and formulating a deeper understanding of the antecedents of initial trust that influence consumer behavioral intention that might be responsible for the slow diffusion of mobile banking services in the country. The results from this study will help financial institutions create a beneficial connection with consumers while alleviating the fears of non-adopters and enhancing their understanding of the benefits of mobile banking.

While there are several readiness assessments regarding digital transformation (DT) and Industry 4.0 in extant literature, this study aims to contribute to (a) a better understanding of digital readiness in supply chain (SC) aspects and (b) elaborate on differences between small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large enterprises.

The study is based on 409 companies that participated in the Digital Readiness Check (DRC) in the region of Salzburg (Austria) and Bavaria (Germany) – an online assessment for self-evaluating the digital readiness of companies.

The study's results provide insights for the categories of strategy, employees, initiation of business transactions and SC. These are further differentiated for SMEs and large enterprises.

The study is limited to two regions in Austria and Germany, based on a self-evaluation of companies in a single point of time perspective. For future research, the results of this study should be expanded for different regions. Further, the results could be validated regarding external observations and measuring results at a later point of time.

The DRC may help companies in benchmarking themselves and gaining a better understanding about categories that must be improved, especially regarding SC aspects of DT.

The DRC extends extant literature regarding the differentiation between SMEs and large enterprises as well as focussing on SC aspects of DT.

This article discusses the use of online asynchronous discussion boards as a valuable tool for connecting students to leadership concepts, theories, and models in introductory leadership survey courses. Recommendations are given for designing effective discussion boards that engage students and enhance their learning. Student outcomes include construction of knowledge, relevant connections between course material and personal lives, and critical reflection.

Social media has been gaining importance in recent years as an integral part of entrepreneurs’ business and marketing strategies. At the same time, the entrepreneurial use of social media can lead to dark and negative consequences. This aspect has received less attention in the literature so far. The purpose of this study is to advice entrepreneurial practitioners to balance the sides of pros and cons as being an inherent reality to acknowledge the full scenario of business life and the interplay of diverse influences.

The qualitative interviews focused on the dark side experiences of micro-entrepreneurs on social media and on strategies to protect their private identities and businesses from those dark side effects. For the theoretical classification of dark side experiences, the framework of Baccarella et al. (2018) was used and adapted based on the experiences reported.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is one of the first to provide an understanding of the negative experiences micro-entrepreneurs face on social media. The research showed the relevance of five out of the seven dark-side building blocks and identified time as a further influential aspect. Thereby, the authors learn to comprehend the negative sides of social media for micro-operated businesses. The findings highlight the need to understand entrepreneurial social media use with simultaneously negative hazards and economic and social challenges. Addressing the entanglement of the entrepreneurial and private selves of micro-entrepreneurs, the findings demonstrate entrepreneur’s attempts of distancing or cleaning the negativity from their private identities and their businesses.

This paper problematizes dark sides as critical elements in entrepreneurial practice, which are too often neglected when discussing entrepreneurial marketing in general and entrepreneurship in social media specifically. The self is always captured between two sides, including the problematic (“dark”) and the bright.

E-business maturity models have been widely used to guide the process of digital transformation of business. However, these models have been criticized for their predominantly technocentric approach, which is poorly suited for SMEs. The purpose of this paper is to produce a holistic, nonlinear e-business development model for SMEs that takes into account the interactions of the organization in the pursuit of its business objectives.

Based on the literature review, this paper proposes a nonlinear digital development model for SMEs that factors in the interactions between digital technologies and organizational processes. The model is applied to three cases using a qualitative research approach.

The analysis of the cases demonstrates how the model recognizes that SMEs have an agile and flexible operating structure and reduces the role of technology in order to refocus the entrepreneurs on the relationship among business goals, organizational capabilities and communication requirements.

The proposed model helps the business owners to clarify and better understand what kind of interaction levels exist between the relevant actors in the pursuit of the firm's goals and to identify the best mix of digital and nondigital communication methods to support their work. It also assists policymakers to overcome technological bias when assessing the current state of play of e-business development in the SME universe and formulate actions that support the development of digitally oriented SMEs.

This paper proposes a novel, nonlinear, interaction-based development model for SMEs in order to complement previous technocentric models focusing mainly on a mechanist perspective of e-business maturity models.

The purpose of this study is to understand how digital servitization enables the process of internationalization for industrial SMEs.

The present study has adopted an exploratory multiple case study, conducting a total of 40 interviews in a two-phased approach to data collection. The first phase consisted of exploratory interviews with twenty-six industrial SMEs connected to the manufacturing industry in Sweden and Finland. Then, six SMEs were selected in the second phase to participate in additional in-depth interviews.

First, this study identifies three gradual enabling phases concerned with the digital service maturity of SMEs consisting of digital awareness, digital service innovation and digital service mass customization. Second, the three interdependent phases of ecosystem knowledge synergy, ecosystem integration and ecosystem value co-creation were identified to improve ecosystem involvement. Finally, a process framework has been developed for SME internationalization consisting of a digital servitization innovation strategy, a digital servitization ecosystem strategy and a digital servitization scaling strategy.

The present research contributes to how digital servitization enables SME internationalization by demonstrating how the development of digital service offerings and ecosystem partnerships supports the internationalization process. This research extends the literature by proposing a process framework for the digital-servitization-enabled internationalization of SMEs. This process perspective provides a richer explanation of the complex interplay between servitization, digitalization and ecosystems choices, which supports the expansion into international markets.