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9. Digitalisation in enterprises' business activity

Digitalisation refers to transferring goods, services and their production or distribution to electronic format and, similarly as the question on big data, the importance of digitalisation in enterprises’ business activity was inquired for the second time in connection with the Innovation Survey.

Forty-one per cent of enterprises estimated that at least one thing related to digitalisation had high importance in 2014 to 2016. Every third enterprise felt that issues of digitalisation had at least medium importance. In all, 13 per cent of enterprises estimated that the alternatives given had at most low importance and good every tenth saw that the mentioned digitalisation factors did not concern their enterprise at all.

Compared with the previous survey, enterprises rated digitalisation now relatively more often and also assessed its importance as higher.

Digital products are the core of digitalisation. Every fifth enterprise assessed their importance as high in their business activity. Cloud services are mentioned generally, and they are important examined by importance as well. In turn, social media, which is also commonly mentioned, has a significant role for a smaller group of enterprises.

Figure 24. Importance of digitalisation in enterprises’ business activity in 2012 to 2014 (in the figure 2014) and in 2014 to 2016 (in the figure 2016), share of enterprises

For enterprises in services industries many items of digitalisation in the survey appear to be more commonly important than in manufacturing enterprises. Only robotics was clearly more important in manufacturing than in services.

For example, cloud services, digitalisation of production and digitalisation of marketing and distribution were assessed by nearly one-half of enterprises in services as having at least medium importance for the enterprise's business activity. In manufacturing, the share is around one-third of enterprises, for cloud services slightly more and for distribution slightly less. Data by industry can be found in the database tables on the home page of the statistics http://pxnet2.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__ttt__inn

Figure 25. Importance of digitalisation in enterprises' business activities in manufacturing in 2014 to 2016, share of enterprises

Figure 26. Importance of digitalisation in enterprises' business activities in services in 2014 to 2016, share of enterprises

Source: Innovation 2016, Statistics Finland

Inquiries: Mervi Niemi 029 551 3263, Heidi Pirkola 029 551 3246, tiede.teknologia@stat.fi

Director in charge: Sami Saarikivi

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Updated 12.4.2018