| Abstract: | A major trend in the modern economy is the increasing collaboration among firms having complementary resources, both at the operational and at the product/service and process innovation level. At the same time another major trend in the area of information and communication technologies (ICT) is the emergence of cloud computing (CC), which changes radically the way firms access and use ICT for supporting their activities. It has been argued that there is an association between these two trends: that CC can significantly support and facilitate business collaboration at a low cost. However, there has been no empirical investigation of this association based on large datasets. This paper contributes to filling this research gap, by presenting an empirical investigation of the effects of firm’s operational and innovation collaboration with other firms, and also the use of ICT for supporting it, on firm’s propensity to adopt CC. It is based on a dataset collected in the e-Business Survey of the European Commission from 676 European firms from the glass, ceramics and cement industries. It has been concluded that innovation collaboration with other firms, and also the use of ICT for supporting it, have positive effects on the propensity to adopt CC; positive effects has also, mainly in the smaller firms, the use of ICT for supporting some forms of operational collaboration with other firms. |
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Greek