Supporting Small and Medium Sized Enterprises in the Digital Transformation – Reflections on a Flagship Support Program in Germany

For years, national governments and supranational groups such as the European Union are therefore increasingly supporting SMEs in order to enable capacities for evaluating existing solutions and developing their own. We wish to reflect on one of these activities: the five- year project Gemeinsam digital which is part of a larger program Mittelstand 4.0 funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (renamed the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action in 2021) to boost the digital transformation of SMEs in Germany.