The European Commission and SME support mechanisms for e‐business

This paper explores and validates the premise that European small‐ to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) are less advanced in their adoption of e‐business than their US counterparts. The authors then examine the efforts of the European Information Society Project Office (ECISPO) in encouraging and informing SMEs by using the Internet as an educational, informational and networking tool. The methods employed by the ECISPO are evaluated against an information processing model. The authors then question the validity/usefulness of the site usage statistics which are provided in an aggregated format. The paper concludes that the full interactivity of the Web is being underutilised as an informational tool and proposes an e‐business adoption model for the SME sector. The paper also concludes that site usage statistics need to be presented in a disaggregated form to enable more detailed analysis to be performed.