Nudging Manufacturing SMEs to Digitalize: Addressing Cognitive Biases to Foster their ICT Adoption

Compared to large companies, small and medium-sized enterprises are lagging in their digitalization process. However, SMEs have many interests in adopting new technologies in their production and management processes: more profits, more visibility by their customers and therefore a wider customer base, cost reduction, creation of added value for customers, etc. The presence of many obstacles encountered by SMEs explains their delay and slows them down in their digital journey. In particular, the manufacturing sector is the one that faces the most obstacles and among these, the internal resistance to change deserves special attention. Indeed, given the benefits of digitalization, resisting change is a deviation from rationality, which is why it can be explained by cognitive biases such as status quo bias, loss aversion and present bias. It is essential to understand these biases that push manufacturing SMEs to make this irrational choice to be able to, in the last stage, overcome them by nudging these SMEs to go digital.