Opportunities and spread of Information and Communication Technologies: Evidence from Indian clusters of small- and medium-sized enterprises

The wide spread of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) characterising the recent competitive scenario is giving rise to the great interest of researchers and practitioners. Many studies are addressed to give answers to different questions concerning, for example, the impact of ICTs on organisations, the role of ICTs in economic development, the opportunities given by ICT adoption in Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and its performance measurement. In this paper, the opportunities provided by the adoption and implementation of ICT solutions in a particular SME-intensive productive environment, the geographical cluster, are examined. To this end, first, the ICT capabilities and their effects on the value-creating processes characterising a generic supply chain are analysed. Successively, the analysis is contextualised to the geographical clusters in order to identify the more appropriate ICTs for the clusters of SMEs. Finally, the actual ICTs’ spread within the Indian clusters of SMEs is examined