Recording Three

Welcome to the third lecture in our series on the future of small businesses in Europe. The purpose of today's lecture, as you have seen from the title and the abstract, is to examine in more detail the problems facing small and medium-sized enterprises which arise at least in part from having to adapt to rapid advances in technology. And I want to look at these both from a financial and from a personnel point of view and to offer a few hopefully effective solutions.

Here we have three of the most important problems facing small businesses that I want to look at today.

First, keeping up with the pace of technological change. Recruiting high quality staff and at a time of skills shortages in IT as a whole and in a highly competitive market. And the issue of retaining staff once they've been recruited and trained. Now, all of these problems involves significant costs for all businesses. But there are particularly challenging issue for small and medium-sized enterprises. And those costs would vary depending on the size and scale of the businesses.

So let's come to the first issue on our list which is keeping pace with developments in technology. Now we all know that the technology industry is intensely competitive with new products being launched all year round as the various companies strive to compete with each other, rather than, say once a year or every couple of years. And this is a real headache for smaller businesses. So, let's imagine we have a small company which is doing ok. It's just about making a profit and it spends most of its income on the overheads. So for a company in this situation, keeping up to date with the latest technology, even if it's only for the benefit of key staff, this can be hugely expensive.

So in my view, some creative thinking needs to come in here to find ways to help companies in this situation to stay ahead in the game, but at the same time, to remain technologically competitive.

Well, there's a possibility that small groups of companies with similar requirements but not directly competing with each other, they could share the cost of upgrading in much the same way as, let's say, an intranet operates within large organizations. In fact, cost sharing could be a very practical solution, especially in times of financial difficulty. If there's a downward pressure on costs, because of a need for investment in other areas, I would argue that this is a perfectly feasible solution.

23. What does the speaker say about the problems facing small and medium sized enterprises?

24. What does the speaker say about the technology industry?

25. What is a practical solution to the problems of small and medium-sized businesses?