Drivers of SME Digital Transformation in the Context of Intergenerational Cooperation in Slovakia

Introduction

Entrepreneurship is one of the key drivers of the economic, social, and environmental development of society. Recent economic, social, and technological trends, such as fair sustainability of economic growth, digitalization and the industry 4.0, population aging, and the growth of the silver economy present many challenges that manifest into a change of typology of competitive advantage, nature of jobs, jeopardy of a significant proportion of jobs, to new requirements on knowledge and skills, but also lifestyle of individual groups of the population. These trends also pose challenges for the sustainability and development of entrepreneurial activities and need to be flexibly responded by finding new approaches to solve them. Europe is facing an industrial transformation that is part of long-term and structural global changes. Up to 70% of European businesses report a threat to their investment due to a lack of skills, while it is a particular challenge for SMEs (European Union, 2019). In Slovakia, SMEs represented 99,9% of all business entities, employed close to 70% of employees and contributed to the export by 40% as of 2019 (SBA, 2020).

The topic of digitalization and digital transformation has been pronounced in Slovakia since 2019 when the Government approved the 2020 Digital Transformation Strategy for Slovakia (Ministry of Investments, Regional Development and Informatization of the Slovak Republic, 2019). The aim of this document is for Slovakia to become a modern country by 2030 with an innovative and ecological industry benefiting from the digital knowledge and data economy, with an efficient public administration ensuring intelligent use of land and infrastructure, and with an information society whose citizens will reach their full potential and live a quality and safe life in the digital age. The document defines the policy and specific priorities of Slovakia in the context of the ongoing digital transformation of the economy and society under the influence of innovative technologies and global megatrends of the digital age. The strategy places primary emphasis on current innovative technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, 5G Technology, Big Data, and Analytical Data Processing, blockchain, and supercomputers, which will become a new engine of economic growth, strengthening Slovakia's competitiveness. This document is followed by the Action Plan for the Digital Transformation of Slovakia for 2019-2022. It covers all areas of the vision of Slovakia's digital transformation in the fields of the economy, society and education, public administration, territorial development, and research. Despite the existing institutional framework, there is still a shortage of information on SMEs adoption level and how they cope with the ongoing digitalization and digital transformation, especially under the COVID-19 situation.

There is no doubt that key skills in the field of entrepreneurship are influenced by digitalization. Digitalization transforms entrepreneurship in two ways. First, it is the emergence of new entrepreneurial opportunities in the economy. Secondly, it is about transforming business practices, the ways in which these opportunities are best realized. Digitalization has an impact on the radical change/innovation of business models in entrepreneurship (Autio, 2017). This change affects both entrepreneurs in the early stages of entrepreneurship (starting entrepreneurs) and existing small and medium-sized enterprises (established entrepreneurs). As far as starting entrepreneurs are concerned, the new entrepreneurial dynamics will affect both those who want to start a business (stand-up stage and that will affect their choice), those in the start-up stage (in search of a scalable business model) as well as those who are already in the growth phase and have already found a scalable business model. In established small and medium-sized companies, digitalization affects their business models as well as their overall management systems (Autio, 2017). As for the particular benefits related to digitalization of SMEs, the most frequent positive effects include improved financial performance (Eller et al., 2020; Nwankpa and Roumani, 2016; Rivza et al., 2019), improved communication and outreach towards customers through digital channels (Rivza et al., 2019), and developed internationalization capabilities (Dethine et al., 2020; Herve et al., 2020),