European Journal of ePractice

Business strategies and policies that were successful in increasing internet penetration in the early days may no longer be appropriate. This is most probably in countries where a majority of people is already connected to the internet. As more people are online, it becomes more likely that the remaining fraction of non-adopters is either hard to convince, under-skilled or simply lacking the financial resources to afford a connection.

In view of this problem, this paper proposes a policy approach to increase personal computer and internet acceptance in collaboration with the industry. The measures developed within this approach are based on strategies of segmentation and differentiation. This entails that product offerings are specifically targeted towards different socio-demographic groups in the population. In addition, our approach does not only concentrate on removing barriers, as most eInclusion policies do, but also at increasing the value of ICT for end-users.

This approach is based on a project that applied both qualitative and quantitative research methods to investigate the relation between the socio-demographic and socio-economic characteristics of non-users, and on the other hand, their profile in terms of access levels, ICT skills and attitudes towards ICT and their needs and expectations (if any) about ICT. In this paper we show, firstly, that members of homogeneous socio-demographic and socio-economic groups indeed share similar characteristics in terms of access, skills and attitudes and, secondly, that these groups can be effectively reached by policy makers and businesses with specific product offerings.