Digital Ecosystems, Digital Skill, and Business Performance: A Study on Graduate Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Pandemic COVID-19 has affected the business ecosystem. Nevertheless, the world of digital delivers opportunities for business optimization especially for SMEs to survive these challenges. Even though the digital ecosystem may represent either an opportunity or a challenge to SMEs, the result depends on how SMEs strategically undertake. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the relationship between the digital ecosystem and digital skills on business performance among university graduate entrepreneurs. Three different sectors were chosen namely manufacturing and retail sectors. Respondent profiles, descriptive statistics and correlation analysis and multiple regression were utilized in this study. The findings revealed experience in business is seen as one of the important factors that can affect the performance of a business. A multiple regression analysis depicted that there was a significant influence between all digital ecosystem factors (e-readiness, knowledge management ICT utilization) on business performance. The digital skill also shows high significant influence on business performance. Therefore, it is suggested universities in Malaysia need to equip and prioritize students with more digital ecosystems and skills in their curricula.