The digitalisation of services and products is now a regular element of every business process. Its impact on company performance however, isn’t yet fully realized. In this study, the Italian startup community is examined to discover their digital behaviour. In particular, the adoption of inter-organizational and intra-organizational digital infrastructures is considered. By using a mixed methods approach, the results of manual analysis (Step 3) as well as computer-assisted analysis (Step 4), and confirmation analysis (Step 5) are triangulated in order to determine the most significant factors affecting the digital behavior of Italian startups.
The analysis of the data shows that, on an average, Italian startups adopt 1.23 inter-organizational digital infrastructures and 1.75 intra-organizational digital infrastructures. It is also evident that the use of these digital infrastructures is limited as, on average, around 80% of the analyzed Italian startups have no more than two of the inter-organizational digital systems considered and 68% of the startups have not adopted more than one of the intra-organizational digital infrastructures.
These results suggest that a significant majority of Italian startups exhibit a digital follower behaviour rather than advancing digital leadership. The primary reason may be due to the fact that, despite being enrolled in the Startup Act policy initiative, they aren’t yet mature enough for digital leadership strategies. For this reason, it is suggested that the government implements new policies aimed at supporting the digitalization of the Italian startup ecosystem. This could include, for example public financial incentives aimed at facilitating the digitalization of startups.