Publication Details
Abstract
The trade sector is the backbone of Samarkand Region's economy, generating roughly a quarter of regional gross product and employing close to one in five members of the working-age population. Yet its capacity to compete on anything other than price remains fragile. Innovation adoption is uneven, concentrated among the handful of large enterprises operating in the regional centre, and largely absent from the eighty-odd percent of businesses that are small or micro in scale. This paper examines why that gap persists and what a workable policy response would look like. Drawing on a structured survey of 124 trade enterprises conducted in late 2023, supplemented by five years of regional statistical data and a scored expert assessment, the study shows that financing constraints, digital skills deficits, and an overly burdensome regulatory environment account for the bulk of the adoption shortfall. Enterprises that have managed to overcome these barriers grew their revenues at roughly four times the rate of their non-innovating peers over the 2021-2023 period. On the basis of these findings, the paper proposes a Six-Pillar Organisational-Economic Mechanism (SPOEM) and maps out a realistic three-year implementation path.