The business response to Covid-19 one year on: findings from the second wave of the CEP-CBI survey on technology adoption

Juliana Oliveira-Cunha, Capucine Riom and Anna Valero

CEP Covid-19 Analyses from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: We present new data from a survey of 425 UK businesses conducted in July 2021 in partnership with the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), which seeks to understand the ways in which firms have innovated one year on in response to the pandemic. We find that process innovation has been widespread since March 2020: 75% of firms have adopted digital technologies, 55% new digital capabilities and nearly 70% new management practices, and a large share of firms continued to innovate beyond the initial lockdowns. We find similar patterns in terms of the introduction of new products or services. We describe how the self-reported impacts of these technologies on firm performance and on workers differ across types of businesses, technologies adopted and business functions that these technologies relate to. We find that previous technology adoption is a strong predictor of a continued innovation response to the crisis, and that gaps in performance between more and less digitised firms might be expected to widen in the future.

Keywords: Covid-19; Technological change; Productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-11-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse, nep-dem, nep-pay and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cepcovid-19-024.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepcvd:cepcovid-19-024

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Covid-19 Analyses from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().