Story notes contributed by Dr. Xaver Neumeyer, Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at the UNCW Cameron School of Business.
Xaver Neumeyer, Ph.D. assistant professor of entrepreneurship at UNCW Cameron School of Business recently published “Overcoming Barriers to Technology Adoption When Fostering Entrepreneurship Among the Poor: The Role of Technology and Digital Literacy” in IEEE Transactions of Engineering Management. The journal is rated “A” by the Australian Business Dean’s Council.
In a collaborative effort with Dr. Susana Santos of Rowan University and Dr. Michael Morris of the University of Notre Dame, the primary finding is that technology and digital literacy is a critical (but understudied) concept in the discussion surrounding inclusion, empowerment, technology, and poverty entrepreneurship. The article is part of a pipeline of work on poverty entrepreneurship in developed economies, that includes a book and two other peer-reviewed journal publications.
According to Dr. Neumeyer and his collaborators, “We argue that despite claims that new digital technologies and platforms have led to a democratization of entrepreneurship, low-income individuals often struggle to develop the necessary skills and competencies to incorporate new technologies in their entrepreneurial ventures. The reasons for this are manifold and range from infrastructure deficits to transportation and financing. For example, public libraries serve to allow the poor access to information and communication technologies such as personal computers or the internet but are often restricted in their capacity and accessibility via public transport, which the poor heavily rely on. Therefore, to address these issues, we present an integrative framework that configures technology and digital literacy along three dimensions (cognitive, social, and technical) and four levels (basic usage, application, development, and transformation), extending existing research on poverty conditions, external enablers, technology adoption, and absorptive capacity.
Read the journal article here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9102422
