The introduction of the Digital Single Market endows SMEs with the opportunity to widen their scope of action as well as with the necessity to rethink their business model in an integrated way. Relationships with clients and suppliers, interplay with digital platforms, innovation patterns and...

Digitalization is changing the way businesses are organized, compete in digital markets, finance themselves, pay taxes, employ labor and other production factors. Such changes represent a major opportunity, but they also pose important challenges. In this book we focus in on small and...

This chapter examines how digital technologies affect the expansion of female-led SMEs. Several researchers have shown the difficulties faced by women entrepreneurs. Women-owned firms are smaller than male-owned ones in terms of sales, assets and number of employees; have difficult relationships...

Digitalization is transforming European agriculture and rural areas through the accelerated, if uneven, adoption of existing digital technologies and the emergence of new ones. This chapter focuses on the digitalization of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in agriculture and rural...

This article stresses the political dimensions embedded in the myths fueling digital capitalism. Based on an interdisciplinary literature on technological innovation processes, the paper questions the idea of a dematerialized, automated, and sustainable economy that underlies the digital...

The technological revolution driven by the emergence of Artificial Intelligence and robots might represent either a threat to or an opportunity for Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurship. On one side, as a process innovation it is expected to give incumbents a large...

The European Commission is taking a stronger stand on mergers involving small firms in digital markets. Following the re-assessment of Article 22 of Merger Regulation, the Commission has investigated a vertical concentration involving the acquisition of a small firm (Kustomer) by Meta (formerly...

In this article we analyze some of the most relevant contributions of the economic literature on competition among platforms and among firms selling their products within or across platforms. We focus on the impact that such new business models produce on prices, firm profits, and welfare, with...

The advent of the digital economy has boosted productivity through greater efficiency in production processes and information exchanges. Despite its promise, digital economy is posing many tax challenges due to the high mobility of capital and taxpayers and the numerous cross-border...

The chapter analyzes how the regulatory context in which SMEs traditionally operate has changed today. The European legislative framework connected to the affirmation of the Digital Single Market requires all companies, and in particular SMEs, to modify their activities in a digital sense. This...