Best practices in overcoming pitfalls and barriers: An FBD - supporting digitization in SMEs - evaluation report

This report is part of the evaluation and results of the Interreg North Sea Region
project Futures by Design. The project has been running from 2019 to 2022 and
recently came to an end. Throughout the project, data and information has been
collected from participating companies and project partner organizations, the
beneficiaries, which forms the base for this report. One of the main sources of
information presented in this report was a round of focus group interviews in
which the beneficiaries discussed pitfalls and difficulties they had faced during
their work with SMEs. The goal of this report is to present and explain the pitfalls
and barriers that can occur on the organizational as well as the participating side
of a digitization project at an international level. With this, this report informs
future projects with a similar set-up to effectively organize business support
particularly to smaller companies. Also, it forms a stepping stone towards the
continuation of Futures by Design outside the context of Interreg NSR. First, the
project, its organization, goal and procedure are outlined. Subsequently, pitfalls
and barriers to digitization are addressed from the viewpoint of the beneficiaries
as well as from the perspective of the SMEs. Then, strategies to overcome these
barriers are laid out and summarized in a number of best practices. Finally, the
report ends with a conclusion.