International Conference Decision making for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (DEMSME 2021)

  • Michal Stoklasa
  • 14.05.2021
On 13th - 14th May, we have organized an international scientific conference called Decision Making for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (DEMSME 2021). The organizers are the Department of Business Economics and Management and the Department of Informatics and Mathematics.

The third edition of Decision Making for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (DEMSME 2021) should have taken place in Congress & Wellness Hotel Olšanka in Prague. Unfortunately, due to pandemic and government restrictions we had to shift the programme of the conference to the virtual form in MS Teams environment. The conference was traditionally a meeting of experts from universities and businesses interested in the theory and application of decision making processes using informatics and mathematics, business economics, management and marketing approaches in the practice of SMEs. The conference results are published in the conference proceedings sent to the Web of Science database and / or in partner journals indexed in Web of Science and / or Scopus.

Total of 84 original contributions from 14 countries (namely the Czechia, Slovakia, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Spain, Croatia, Greece, India, Tunisia, Latvia, Iran, France, and Poland) has been accepted. The best papers will be selected for the publication in our 11 partner journals (e.g., Journal of East-West Business, European Journal of International Management, Scientific Annals of Economics and Business, Organizacija, Central European Business Review, etc).


The papers link scientific activities with up-to-date practice dedicated to SMEs and beyond. The emphasis in this edition of DEMSME was given, e.g., to the theory of acceptance and use of technology, e-commerce, buyers’ preferences and management strategies during pandemic, creating sustainable competitive advantage, shaping and improving the human resource management, behavioral aspects of decision making in SMEs, innovation and knowledge sharing, brand support and online marketing, ICT tools and their use in Industry 4.0, process mining, robotic process automation, mathematical models, business intelligence, exchange rates, consumers’ behaviour and business performance measurements. Most of the papers brought up-and-coming case studies, which could be implemented immediately into SMEs practice. The conference was enriched by 2 keynote speeches delivered by Václav Švec and Jana Švecová (Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Czechia, with the topic „Team Academy implementation in the Czech Higher Education context“), and Tomáš Gavlas (TietoEVRY, Czechia, with the topic „Predictive Analytics: Unified solution for real-time application and business process performance visibility and insights using machine learning “).

Great thanks to the program committee of the conference, its organizers and, last but not least, its partners and sponsors, alongside the Silesian University in Opava, School of Business Administration in Karvina, also European Structural and Investment Funds (Operational Programme Research, Development and Education), Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, Veolia company, IT Cluster of Moravian-Silesian Region (Czechia), Czech Society for System Integration and European Council for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ECSB). We believe that the 3rd edition of the DEMSME conference was once again successful and we look forward to its repetition in two-year cycles next to other traditional scientific conferences organized at the Silesian University in Opava, School of Business Administration in Karvina, Czechia.

More information is available at the conference website here.