Main focus on sustainability and prosperity.
Released just at the end of 2021, a new white paper by the World Economic Forum dives deeper into the realm of SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) and their future. International Investor got early-bird access to the entire report of 43 pages in which a group of analysts, social scientists, and economists highlight their main concerns and key points for global businesses and how they can improve their current situation for a post-COVID scenario.
The white paper is called “Future Readiness of SMEs: Mobilizing the SME Sector to Drive Widespread Sustainability and Prosperity”, with it the World Economic Forum wants to extend its compromise by uncovering a wide set of organizational capabilities and orientations, all with a single goal in mind: To help SMEs from all over the world to “become future-ready” by embracing new technologies, approaches, and challenges.
According to the report, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) provide more than 70% of all employment, and they also represent around 90% of all firms in the world. In other words, these initiatives play an integral and crucial role in the sustainability and growth of all economies.
Nevertheless, the paper devotes an entire section to criticize the great amount of attention that big multinational corporations get in the media, while most SMEs are barely recognized, celebrated and even ignored, while the bigger picture says that they’re the main catalysts of economic activity and substantial progress in the many different regions of the world.
To develop such a far-reaching document, the World Economic Forum relied on the testimonies and experiences of nearly 300 chief executive officers and founders of SMEs, and more than 200 peer-reviewed articles related to this topic, an outstanding effort that took over 1 year from inception to completion.
“The World Economic Forum has long been at the forefront of recognizing the strategic importance of sustainable value creation objectives for business, as shown through a recent partnership with more than 60 multinationals, including Bank of America, Mastercard and KPMG, in support of a new reporting framework for environmental, social and governance standards.” Said Børge Brende, President of the World Economic Forum in a brief message extracted from the foreword in the actual report.
Luckily, the white paper is now in the public domain, and anyone on the internet can have access to it thanks to its ever-useful Creative Commons licenses, if you want to take a look at it just click here.
