Understanding the Challenges of Adaptation of Digital Platforms by SMEs

This research aims to investigate the main challenges of Digital Platforms (DPs) toward transformational entrepreneurship in emerging countries. Identifying the main challenges of DPs, screening the most prominent challenges toward transformational entrepreneurship, analysing the causal relationship of the challenges, and determining the importance and the role of the DP challenges for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in emerging countries are revealed in this research. In this regard, a mixed-method approach has been employed while first extracting the list of DP challenges via a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Then in the quantitative section, a multi-layer decision-making approach consisting of Delphi, and Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) are applied to screen the most important challenges toward transformational entrepreneurship, analyze the relationship amongst the challenges and determine the importance and the role of DP challenges, relatively. To consider the uncertainty of the environment in emerging countries and to include the intuition and hesitation of the entrepreneurs in the analytical section, intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFS) are considered and a novel IF-Delphi-ISM approach is presented. Moreover, the results and findings are discussed in different scenarios including optimistic, possible, and pessimistic circumstances.