Leveraging digital platforms for SMEs growth and resilience in South Africa

The impact of digital transformation on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in emerging economies

The findings indicate that e-commerce, cloud computing, customer relationship management, and digital marketing tools supported operational coordination, market reach, and customer engagement, but limited digital skills, implementation costs, cybersecurity risks, and infrastructure constraints restricted deeper adoption.

From Bytes to Businesses: The Role of Digital Technologies in Fostering Sustainable Entrepreneurship in Asia

Digital tools are changing how entrepreneurs across Asia start, scale, and sustain their ventures. Drawing together recent work on digital transformation, financial technology (fintech), and sustainable entrepreneurship, this conceptual paper asks how information technology (IT) adoption helps small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups pursue economic, environmental, and social goals at once. Building on studies of entrepreneurial orientation, organizational resilience, and green finance, it proposes an integrated framework — tested through eight hypotheses (H1–H8) — in which digital adoption operates as a mediated, moderated pathway to sustainable performance rather than a direct cause of it. The review indicates that IT adoption expands market reach, financial inclusion, and resource efficiency, yet its sustainability payoff hinges on entrepreneurial competencies, infrastructure maturity, and policy support that differ sharply across the region. The paper closes with a proposed empirical design, literature-grounded expectations for each hypothesis, and implications for researchers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers.  

From Intention to Implementation: Digital Marketing Challenges for Indonesian Seaweed SMEs

The rapid digital transformation in developing economies presents both unprecedented opportunities and significant challenges for local businesses. This study examines how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) producing seaweed-based products in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, implement digital marketing strategies, and why a gap persists between their intention to adopt such strategies and their capacity to enact them effectively. Adopting a qualitative, multi-case design, data were gathered from owners and managers of twenty SMEs through in-depth interviews, observation, and documentation. The data were analyzed thematically along four dimensions of digital-marketing competence (accessibility, interactivity, credibility, and informativeness) using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) as the interpretive lens. The findings reveal a consistent intention-implementation gap; strong performance expectancy and social influence sustain adoption intentions, whereas high effort expectancy and weak facilitating conditions constrain effective practice. The study highlights the urgent need for targeted training and ecosystem support, offering a context-specific account of enterprise digitalization in an under-researched agro-marine sector

Digital Maturity and SME Economic Sustainability: A PRISMA-Based Systematic Review of the Role of Government Support

This systematic literature review explores the relationship between digital maturity and economic sustainability, with government support as a moderating factor, and proposes a multi-level conceptual framework and actionable policy recommendations to support inclusive and adaptive SME digitalization.

Business model innovation in SMEs for sustainable and digital transformation: a systematic review and integrative framework

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) increasingly need to reconfigure how they create, deliver, and capture value in response to digitalisation, sustainability demands, and environmental uncertainty. This study systematically reviews 162 English-language articles published in SSCI-indexed journals to integrate fragmented research on business model innovation (BMI) in SMEs. Descriptive analysis, keyword co-occurrence analysis, and article-level qualitative content analysis are combined. The findings identify four broad knowledge domains and show that 41 studies treat BMI primarily as an outcome, 44 as an organisational process, 17 as an antecedent of subsequent outcomes, and 36 as part of a combined causal relationship; a further 24 studies are descriptive or typological. Across these roles, the literature explains BMI through resource mobilisation, entrepreneurial action logics, absorptive and dynamic capabilities, experimentation, and network mobilisation. Its effects on performance, growth, resilience, internationalisation, and sustainability depend on complementary resources, implementation capabilities, stakeholder alignment, and environmental conditions. The evidence supports an adaptive and iterative interpretation of SME BMI, but direct evidence of recursive feedback remains limited. Resource constraints also have conditional effects, stimulating bricolage and focused experimentation in some circumstances while inhibiting substantive change when shortages become severe. The review provides an integrative synthesis specific to SMEs and advances digital business model innovation research by explaining how digital pressures are translated into changes in value proposition, value creation and delivery, and value capture through organisational and relational mechanisms.

Business Model Innovation: How Partnering with a Digital Platform Impacts SMEs