Digital Maturity, Digital Innovations, And Digital Skills

Abstract

Digital maturity models enable evaluating an organization's existing positioning and capabilities for digitalization and provide identifying necessary capabilities. This study explores the current digital maturity level of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a developing country setting by concentrating on Turkish SMEs. Despite the increasing importance of digital transformation, empirical research on factors associated with digital maturity is scarce. As a result of exploring a knowledge gap, this study concentrates on two individual factors (digital skills and risk aversion of the owner/manager) and one organizational factor (digital innovations) and their link with the digital maturity level of SMEs. The findings represent that the digital maturity level of organizations increases by the digital skills of the owner/manager, and organizations with risk-averse owners/managers are more likely to demonstrate lower levels of maturity. Besides, it is also explored that digital innovations performance is correlated with the digital maturity and digital skills of the owners/managers.