This news article was originally written in Spanish. It has been automatically translated for your convenience. Reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate translation, however, no automated translation is perfect nor is it intended to replace a human translator. The original article in Spanish can be viewed at Europa se moviliza para acelerar el e-business en las Pymes

The EIC-Business initiative: information campaign on electronic commerce

Europe moves to speed up the e-business by SMEs

Marta Torres
Drafting Metalunivers15/05/2002

EIC-Business is called and is a campaign of the European Commission to inform small and medium-sized businesses of the benefits of electronic commerce. This campaign is part of a broader initiative on e-commerce under the expressive name of Go digital wants to accelerate the use of the tools offered by the internet in the sale and purchase of goods and services.

EIC-Business Account in Spain with a web (www.eic-business.org) and the collaboration of 18 Euro Info Centres (confederations of employers and cameras of trade in his majority) that offer help to the companies that want to deepen in the digital trade. This help includes information, learning and personalised and free quality consultancy to the companies interested in the areas of strategy and márqueting, design and implantation of web pages, computer technology and of telecommunications, hygiene and certification (digital signature), legal and fiscal appearances and instruments of financials.
EIC-Business Account in Spain with a web (www.eic-business.org) and the collaboration of 18 Euro Info Centres (confederations of employers and cameras of trade in his majority) that offer help to the companies that want to deepen in the digital trade. This help includes information, learning and personalised and free quality consultancy to the companies interested in the areas of strategy and márqueting, design and implantation of web pages, computer technology and of telecommunications, hygiene and certification (digital signature), legal and fiscal appearances and instruments of financials.

Go Digital

This initiative emerged from the European meeting in Lisbon (March 2000), that it agreed to the need to promote European competitiveness through an economy based on knowledge, to what was established as the deadline the year 2010. Following this first declaration of intent was born the eEurope 2002 Action Plan, which included the need for SMEs to the digital world as a key element and that was called: "encourage SMEs to Go Digital".
The main actions imposed this initiative are:

identify the main obstacles that face the SMEs to go in in the electronic business
propose specific actions for helps to the small and medium enterprises
ensure a consistency between the politics to all the levels: regional, local, national and European
learn of practical experiences and studies of market.

The lack of training is one of the reasons adduced

The majority of SMEs that do not use Internet claim "is not applicable to your business"

This information belongs to a survey of the European Network for SME Research (ENSR 2001) containing the first document of the project Go Digital. The analysis of data from the survey concludes that small and medium-sized enterprises mainly allege that they do not come online because it is not applicable to their sector of activity.
On the other hand, is also observed that in general small and micro-enterprises share the same problems as the medium-sized enterprises in addressing the digital commerce.
A curious fact: the lack of staff capacity is more problematic for small businesses than for micro and medium-sized businesses. One possible explanation may be that the medium-sized companies are starting to use more sophisticated applications.
On the other hand, appears to be differences national protection to the consumer not too worried to SMEs.

http://www.EIC-eBusiness.org