Overview

The question of how businesses improve their productivity is of paramount importance in the UK. New technologies can help to improve a firm’s productivity, however the slow rate of technology adoption amongst many UK businesses could impact their ability to compete on an international scale.

In this project, we aim to investigate the significance of a gap in knowledge in hindering firms’ adoption of technology and the extent to which information and guidance provision influences firms’ adoption and impacts their performance.

Methods

This will be done through a randomised controlled trial where we will provide randomly selected firms with guidance on improving their website performance. We also provide them with information about the average website performance of their industry and the performance of industry best practice.  We will then observe behavioural changes resulting from provision of this information.

The information provision or encouragement design will be carried out with 400 randomly selected businesses and another 400 businesses will be used as a control. The intervention is in the form of a toolkit that consists of the firm’s own and benchmark information. The toolkit compiles information from different data sources and the analysed results are provided to businesses.

Findings and Outputs

The result will provide interesting evidence on how information provision about the firm performance changes technology adoption and firm performance.

Research Team

This project is being undertaken by a team of researchers in Nottingham University Business School and School of Economics. The project involves Prof. Richard Kneller, Dr Cher Li and Dr Anwar Adem.

Get in touch:

To find out more or to get involved please use our email: digitalbenchmark@nottingham.ac.uk.