Report of the Prague Conference - Czech SMEs GoDigital

( Support of SMEs participation in the Electronic Commerce)

May 21, 2002, Prague, Senate Hall

Co-organizers and partners:

BMI Association (www.brezen.cz)

UVIS (Office for Public Information Systems), (www.uvis.cz)

Senate Committee for economic, agriculture and transport, (www.senat.cz)

ENERGIA (www.e-energia.org)

Tele2 (www.tele2.cz)

Redbus Interhouse Int. (www.redbus.cz)

Unicorn (www.unicorn.cz)

The Program:

• Support of eBusiness in the Czech Republic,
• Go Digital Summit in Brussels,
• eBusiness in Czech SMEs,
• Czech Green and White book of Electronic Commerce,
• Electronic market places,
• Case studies and success stories,
• International projects IST – ENERGIA (5FP),
• Delphi study.

The Performance

The Prague Conference welcomed 119 participants from 8 countries. Most of audience came from the Czech Republic, including regional SMEs (40%), public administration authorities (40%), bigger companies, foreign participants and media (20 %).

The program of the Prague Conference included several main thematic lines. One of them concerns the different kinds of support for SMEs “to go digital” in the Czech Republic, as it was presented by speakers from State Office for Public information Systems, Chamber of Commerce and Ministry of Industry and Trade. As it was mentioned, Czech Republic is just at the beginning of such a support and in the process of signing of official documents, necessary for the active participation of Czech SMEs in this particular program.

The other thematic line was based on presentation of Go Digital initiative of European Commission and results of Go Digital Summit, which took place a week before in Brussels. Representative of DG INSFO was talking also about SME Take-up projects in the context of eEurope GoDigital Action 6 “Electronic commerce Take-up”. It is exiting, that in strategic areas of e-work, e-business, e-markets, trust and confidence there are 250 pan-European projects for now. Among over 1000 organizations involved there are 40 % of SMEs.

The next block of presentations showed the wide scale of business cases of successful SMEs in different stages of adoption of eBusiness solutions. It is clear, that a software company has all the chances for better transformation completely into Digital company. But it was very interesting to see how the Internet can change the business concept of the company with traditional goods.

Short, but inspirative was the panel discussion concerning first experiences of using and providing  e-marketplaces for CEE countries.

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