Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
Tech start-ups have called for a digital adoption fund to help small businesses upgrade to digital technology.
Adopting digital technology has long been seen as key for the UK to boost its woeful productivity levels.
One in three small businesses – those with fewer than 250 employees – cite cost as the biggest barrier to them adopting digital tech, whether it’s video conferencing such as Teams or Zoom, customer relationship management software such as Salesforce or enterprise resource planning like Oracle Netsuite.
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The digital adoption fund would be based on Singapore’s “SMEs Go Digital” initiative, which offers grants covering over two thirds of what small businesses spend on digital tech. The proposed UK version of the scheme would cover 70 per cent of what it costs to upgrade capped at £22,500 per company.
The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec) report says such a digital adoption fund would close the gap between Britain’s most productive larger companies and the long tail of its unproductive SMEs.
If SMEs were to match the productivity levels of their larger cohorts, it would boost GDP by £92bn.
And if the UK’s 1.1m