E-Learning for SMEs: Challenges, Potential and Impact

The extended enterprise is being implemented worldwide using different e-business technology. To be on the competitive arena today requires cutting-edge competence not only on the products supplied, but also in all aspects of business operation and competence development. ICT is in this respect an extremely powerful tool enabling enterprises to work globally and allowing creation of supply chains, enterprise networks, and learning communities. For SMEs this represents a challenge. SMEs have limited resources to drive this technology, but are at the same time dependent on access to the same technology. There is a special need to be able to collect knowhow from the global community and implement this as competence in the enterprise. E-Learning is an approach for competence development that can assist SMEs in creating a AbstrAct