Resources

Understanding the digital capability of New Zealand businesses – A Digital Index Benchmark

This report provides a comprehensive and representative overview of NZ businesses’ current digital adoption and capability and potential future adaptability, based on research conducted with 2,280 businesses in late 2020. It introduces the ‘New Zealand Business Digital Index’, which captures these attributes in a way that enables us to monitor digital capability progress over time – including by business size and industry.

The Digital Index – which is baselined at 51/100 (as at December 2020) – is being used as a key metric to measure progress against various digital enablement initiatives across government. The methodology is based on similar frameworks used by the OECD and by Lloyd’s Bank in the UK.  It includes some new analysis contributed by BNZ, revealing changes in business purchase behaviour over time.

The next New Zealand Business Digital Index Research will be available early 2022.

B4B Business Research Monitor

The B4B Research Monitor, running since 2014, is a biannual survey of 2,000 NZ businesses. The Research Monitor provides a unique system-wide view of the business experience of government (both local and central), and provides insight into the world of government from a business’ perspective. It is the only research of this type in New Zealand. The B4B Research Monitor is currently being leveraged to help understand and identify the support businesses require as they transition through the impacts of COVID-19 and into economic recovery.

Business Segmentation Framework

To provide additional insight, B4B has established an evidence-based Business Segmentation framework that combines robust data with in-depth interviews. 8 unique business segments have been identified, which have very distinctive needs. These are now tracked as part of our B4B research monitor.

COVID-19 Business Health Research

In May this year Better for Business (B4B) conducted research into the health of kiwi businesses in the context of COVID-19. We have just completed second wave of research to test what has changed and include a deep-dive on how digitally enabled businesses are.

The field work was conducted by independent agency Research New Zealand (RNZ), with a total of 2,280 respondents. The results are weighted to be representative of all NZ businesses by both industry and size. The results are below as two A3 factsheets and one report.

The Small Business factsheet is a good reference guide which complements the Small Business Sector Report. It brings together previously released data from a range of Statistics New Zealand business surveys and summarises the results relating to small businesses.