Strategic pathways to ICT adoption in SMEs: evidence from Greece

This paper explores the impact of different strategic practices on firms' ICT adoption. Drawing on push-pull theories it is argued that business strategies which are strongly linked to the market and/or customer needs are most likely to pull the adoption of ICT. Strategies that mainly confine their scope to the characteristics of the products, implying a more loose connection with the market, are expected to push the ICT adoption process. The empirical analysis based on a large-scale survey on 3,500 Greek SMEs confirms the significance of market-based strategies for ICT adoption. The ordered probit estimations show that market driven strategies (marketing differentiation and market diversification) increase the likelihood of adopting ICT in SMEs while generic competitive strategies (low cost position and product differentiation) do not play any significant role in the adoption of new technologies in most cases. The results appear to be largely robust across different ICT adoption measures.