Determinants of Intra-firm Diffusion Process of ICT: Theoretical Sources and Empirical Evidence from Catalan Firms

The potential for information and communication technology (ICT) usage in business has been a well-covered topic during the last decade. Since ICTs are considered to be ‘general purpose’ technologies (Bresnahan and Trajtenberg, 1995; Antonelli 2003), they are shaping the internal organization of firms, their boundaries and also their productivity and performance. International literature gives empirical evidence that adopting a new technology influences firms’ productivity rates in the short and long term. Short-term productivity losses may affect the decision process of adopting a new technology. In fact, it involves three main decisions:

- whether to adopt or not;

- the replacement speed of old technology with a new one; and

- the extent to which the capabilities of the new technology will be exploited by a firm, which is usually known as ‘depth of adoption’ (Astebro, 2004).