White paper on creativity - ebla center

Chapter 9Table 9.5 highlights the main uses ofICT. In general, the commonest usesare for access to financial or bankingdata and the acquisition ofinformation. Much less use is made fortraining staff, or the acquisition ofaftersales services. It must be stressedthat the latter activity is very closelylinked to the development of adedicated application software able toprovide the firms with ICT platformsto interact with players and welldefinedvirtual environments withregulated access. The sharp differencebetween small and medium firms, onone hand, and large companies, on theother, is not surprising, especially asregards the diffusion of the latter twotechnologies. In both cases the smallfirms are below the national average,albeit only just, whereas large andmedium to large companies havemuch higher figures. As regardsgeographical distribution, interestinglythe largest percentage of firms usingthe Internet to train its own staff is offirms located in the South, with onepercentage point higher than theNorth. The situation is inverted,however, as regards acquisition ofaftersales services, where theNorthwest is the area with the highestpercentage, closely followed by theNortheast and then the other areas.Table 9.5 – Companies with at least 10 employees and an Internet connection bypurpose of useAccess tobank/financialservicesEducationandtrainingstaffAcquisitionof info onmarkets(e.g. prices)Acquisitionof servicesand info indigitalformatAcquisitionof aftersalesservicesCompany Size(No. Employees)10-49 76.3 12.4 63.4 45.5 24.350-99 88.7 16.7 70.3 61.9 32.4100-249 89.2 22.5 78.4 67.3 35.3250 And Over 85.6 30.0 83.5 74.1 36.1GeographicalDistributionNorthwest 79.7 13.4 67.6 49.2 27.5Northeast 81.0 13.7 62.3 49.4 26.7Centre 77.0 12.1 63.2 46.1 24.4South & Islands 70.6 14.3 64.5 45.6 21.2Italy 77.9 13.4 64.7 48.0 25.5WHITE PAPER ON CREATIVITY 223