Effect of Digitization on Small Businesses (SMB) across India

With the advent of India introducing  digital mechanisms of identity, money movement and hence business, Small Businesses and consumers were adopting and adapting to changes introduced by Aadhar, demonetization, GST , UPI, to name a few.

Intuit commissioned a study across Small and Medium Businesses in India to understand the impact of digitization on Small Businesses. To understand the needs of the Small Businesses who went from running business using cash to being compelled to use  government mandated online platforms as the only way to do business.

We researched SMBs across Tier 1, 2 and 3 cities to see if the value of digitization that was expected was being realized and the unintended consequences of digitization. Special attention was paid to observing and understanding the SMB behaviour changes as a result of digitization and how they adapted their business to the changes that digitization brought on.

The deep insights we synthesized from our research led us to prioritise the biggest unmet need that we thought we could solve well while building durable competitive advantage for Intuit. Using this well articulated problem, we generated several disruptive ways of revolutionizing the SMBs’ lives by helping with their biggest unmet need. We went broad and explored different solution approaches before narrowing down to a prioritised set of ideas. We then defined the key assumptions we were making for the prioritised idea to work and ran several rapid experiments to learn and refine our final solution.