The Information Environment of Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs)
People
Businesses with five or fewer employees, called micro-enterprises, support many rural and urban households in developing nations. Microsoft Research India is conducting qualitative and quantitative research to explore the overall information and communication behaviors of micro-enterprises. The main research in India has included a photo-intensive qualitative analysis of 49 small and informal businesses in Bangalore (April 2006), a survey of 347 similar businesses in Hyderabad (January 2007),
Publications
- Jonathan Donner, Mobile-based livelihood services in Africa: pilots and early deployments, Microsoft Research, 24 October 2009
- Jonathan Donner and Marcela Escobari, A review of the research on mobile use by micro and small enterprises (MSEs), in Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, IEEE, April 2009
- Jonathan Donner, Mobile media on low-cost handsets: The resiliency of text messaging among small enterprises in India (and beyond) , in Mobile technologies: from telecommunications to media , pp. 93-104, Routledge, 2009
- Jonathan Donner, Blurring livelihoods and lives: The social uses of mobile phones and socioeconomic development, in Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 91-101, MIT Press, 2009
- Jonathan Donner, Customer acquisition among small and informal businesses in urban India: Comparing face to face, interpersonal, and mediated channels, in The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries, vol. 32, pp. 1-16, 2007
Conference presentations
- Donner, Jonathan. (2008, May 21-22). A typology of mobile uses among small and informal businesses. Paper presented at the Pre-Conference on Mobile Communication at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association. paper :: presentation
- Donner, Jonathan. (2007, July 2-4). Perspectives on mobiles and PCs: Attitudinal convergence and divergence among small businesses in urban India. Paper presented at the Mobile Media: An international conference on social and cultural aspects of mobile phones, convergent media, and wireless technologies, Sydney, Australia.
- Donner, Jonathan. (2006, September 28-30) Internet use (and non-use) among urban microenterprises in the developing world: An update from India. Paper presented at Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Brisbane, Australia.
