Extra-organizational collaboration and use of IT in SME production companies

Abstract

Nearly all SME companies regard their collaboration as a very important part of their success. The measures for collaboration have shown that collaboration covers many external relationships. The index of extra-organizational collaboration is related to internal IT use for business tasks as well as to technologies for internal and extra-organizational collaboration. Internal IT does not substitute external collaboration or vice versa. We find that among the SMEs there is a sufficient share of companies ready for IT applications for the creation and configuration of virtual enterprises. However, there are still "laggers" among the SMEs. Regional agencies continue to have a task in modernization among the SMEs. Further research should investigate the idea of simultaneous co-development as this influences how SMEs should be addressed by development agencies.