About this Report
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadian businesses have turned to digital technologies to help keep them working and selling. Technology has been a key lifeline amid a rapidly shifting business and public health environment. The most digitally intensive businesses have been more resilient than the economy at large, suffering smaller drops in revenue and employment than less digitally intensive sectors.
Yet not all Canadian businesses are able to take advantage of digital technologies. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in particular, suffer from lower levels of digital maturity than their larger peers.
Our latest report, Picking up Speed: Digital Maturity in Canadian SMEs and Why It Matters, contextualizes the current state of digital maturity to help inform the rollout of future programs and feed into Canada’s long-term prosperity. This report was produced in partnership with the Toronto Regional Board of Trade, World Trade Centre Toronto, and the Scale-Up Institute Toronto, and sponsored by Xero.
Digital maturity reflects the use of digital technologies by enterprises in all sectors, not just in technology-developing ones. It comprises the technological intensity of a business (the level of technology adoption and use across both internal and customer-facing operations and processes), and its digital culture (whether it has the skills, leadership, and governance in place to successfully integrate digital technologies).
At the enterprise level, digitally mature firms demonstrate higher levels of revenue growth and higher productivity. There is an increased likelihood that digitally mature firms will also be exporters. Taken together, increasing the overall level of digital maturity of the country’s SMEs could have a significant, positive impact on individual businesses, local communities, and the wider economy in Canada.
Read this report to help you:
- Understand digital maturity and its impact on the economy.
- Recognize the barriers limiting some SMEs from taking advantage of technologies that could acclerate their business growth (for example, knowledge and skills shortages, and the unique barriers faced by women, Black, Indigenous, and recent immigrant business owners).
- Explore the levels of technology adoption by SMEs across different types of digital technology (such as cloud computing and cybersecurity).
- Gain key insights that could help enhance digital maturity for Canadian SMEs.
