Regional specifics of small and medium-sized entrepreneurship digitalization: factors, barriers, ways to overcome them

At present, the processes of digitalization of regional economies and individual economic entities, primarily small and medium-sized businesses, are of particular interest to representatives of the scientific, expert, and political communities. This is due not only to a radical change in approaches to doing business, which implies completely new strategies of interaction with counterparties, clients, regulatory authorities, etc., but also to global challenges (COVID-19 pandemic, sanctions, aggravation of the foreign policy situation) that Russia has faced in recent years. In this regard, it is necessary a detailed analysis of the activities of the object under consideration (small and medium-sized enterprises) in the conditions of digitalization with the identification of its specific features determined by internal and external factors, as well as the identification of barriers to its development, search and scientific substantiation of ways to overcome them. This research makes an attempt at such an analysis. The scientific problem in the article is the presence of the authors’ polar positions regarding the nature of the impact of digitalization processes on small and medium-sized businesses. Moreover, researchers do not have a single opinion on how the features of spatial development determine the specifics of business digitalization processes. The theoretical significance of the study lies in the development of a classification of barriers to the penetration of digitalization processes in entrepreneurial firms. This classification helps to take into account the specifics of these processes depending on the size of the company and the level of socio-economic development of the regions. The practical significance of the results is due to the possibility of using the developed proposals aimed at overcoming the barriers of digitalization by federal and regional authorities, as well as directly by business entities themselves, which have encountered problems on the way to the transition to digitalization of their activities.