Abstract

     Industry 4.0 has already become part of the world’s largest manufacturers and is beginning to influencing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through the supply chain. High-tech industries, such as pharmaceuticals, electronic equipment, aircraft manufacturing, etc., will be the first to face technological transformation. To this end, it becomes relevant to assess the sustainability of the technological development of SMEs as a factor of their successful digital transformation. This paper fills a gap in the study of such development as it pertains to Russian high-tech SMEs. Based on a critical literature review, we propose a new approach to assessing the sustainable technological development of these industries. The approach is distinguished by the use of a set of five indicators highlighted during the literature review, which can be quantified based on financial statements. The choice of variables is justified by their compliance with the specifics of industrial SMEs and KMO and Bartlett tests. We empirically tested the selected indicators using a sample of 7980 enterprises in two high-tech industries: Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE). We concluded that the larger the business, the higher the sustainability of its technological development. At the same time, SMEs have two key advantages in the implementation of technological development – a decrease in resource costs of production, flexibility in asset management and gross profit.

Introduction

     Today, enterprises around the world are facing a new industrial pattern and trying to adapt their production to Industry 4.0 technologies. Thus, technologies and sustainable technological development form the basis of companies’ competitiveness. Large corporations are still the undisputed leaders in the transition to new technologies. However, looking into the near future suggests that small businesses will soon have to adapt to this process. Thus, procedural innovations (introduction of state-of-the-art technologies, updating of old equipment) are important for small industries, and the fourth industrial revolution is characterized by these innovations (Pérez et al., 2018). Raymond and St-Pierre (2010) confirm that technological innovations are a key factor in the competitiveness of industrial small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). They can benefit more from procedural innovations rather than product innovations since small manufacturers are often in tight supply chains and manufacture custom-built products.

Conclusion and policy recommendation

     As a conclusion, we should note that the abductive approach combined deductive and inductive data. A critical analysis of the existing methods for assessing the technological development of industrial enterprises was used as deductive data, which allowed us to identify a set of key indicators. The inductive data resulted from the empirical testing of the indicators identified in theory. The use of our approach allowed us to assess the sustainability of the technological development of high-tech SMEs based on the methods of statistical processing of big data. Thus, we filled two significant gaps in the literature: (1) we proposed a new methodology for assessing the sustainability of technological development of industrial SMEs and (2) for the first time, we empirically studied the activities of such enterprises in Russia.

     The empirical assessment of the sustainability of the technological development of high-tech SMEs allowed us to make several important conclusions.