Data Unleashed: Empowering Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) for Innovation and Success

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), as the backbone of any economy, play a vital role in stimulating job creation, fostering economic growth, and driving innovation and entrepreneurship. Despite their crucial role, they encounter obstacles to fully leveraging the data derived from the Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies.

Based on a survey of 111 SMEs and complementary research, this paper identifies five main challenges these companies face in becoming data-ready: IT infrastructure, data regulation and governance, cross-border data flows, extracting value from data, and tracking sustainability data. The paper proposes five recommendations to overcome these challenges, which focus on proactive data governance, capacity building, assessing available IT infrastructure and prioritizing data needs, building resilient IT infrastructure to facilitate cross-border data flows, and promoting environmental responsibility and supply chain transparency. Finally, this publication provides a call to action for SMEs with principles that can guide the implementation of the recommendations and outline mutually beneficial strategies that other key stakeholders can implement, to collectively move towards a data-driven global business environment.