Liberating the power of SMEs

Most of us have seen how small enterprises can be innovative, fast and agile - when larger ones show up as lumbering giants - trying desparately to cure themselves with new "management" tools. Long way to go before management is less about control and more about leading change.

One reason for favoring large enterprises has been that the inevitble cost of administration - bookkeeping, IT and the like - can be spread out over a larger number of units sold.

This may now be changing as we are seeing that it is not particularly difficult to automate away most of the administration once b2b interaction has been moved into structured formats. Electronic invoicing is the paradigmatic platform for this and above all SMEs should run for it.

What could it mean for competitiveness of EU countries if:

- the cost of unnecessary manual transactions have been eliminated  with a full digitalization drive http://boharald.blogspot.com/2009/10/e-invoicing-enabling-platform.html

- increasingly scarce workforce has moved from causing only cost to hunting income in enterprises

- SMEs - freed of administration work and cost http://boharald.blogspot.com/2009/11/bloodletting.html - can deploy their full potential - do much more of the work presently done only in large enterprises

- venture capital realizing that there are is a new paradigm in the SME sector

What would it mean for GDP? EU presented a study some time ago saying that a 10% increase in payment automation would have a 0,5% impact on GDP....

We are on this road - but it takes quite some energy to get the ball rolling in all countries.