Digital transformation at the present stage and its impact on innovation

Abstract

The widespread and active development, as well as the diffusion of new digital technologies, are currently significantly changing the structure of the main foreign trade and socio-economic sectors. An increasing number of organizations are moving their business to the digital sphere, significantly reducing, at the same time, transaction costs and increasing the results of their functioning. Due to the use of digital technologies, an extensive and, practically, barrier-free market is being formed in global networks with strong competition and the dynamics of the development of its elements (IT companies, digital pricing, services, products, digital consumption). In the digitalization market, the main factor of competitive advantages is the company's ability to analyze (process and analyze) big data. The prospects and sustainability of functioning and development of a business are determined by its ability to respond significantly faster than it was earlier (2530 years ago) to rapidly changing consumer needs and quickly deliver new (innovative) products (services) to the market using electronic channels of information dissemination, advertising and, directly, sales. The author notes in the article that the scale of digital transformation in the development of new digital technologies and business models differs significantly in different foreign economic activities. For example, in the field of retail and financial services, they have been widely used for more than 10 years, and the pandemic of the early 2000-s significantly strengthened this transformational trend. In some of the most conservative foreign economic activities, we observe the opposite picture, where platform digital solutions require not only technological adaptation to digitalization processes, but also significant organizational and structural changes, as well as the restructuring of traditional business processes to digital ones. But, despite significant industry differences, unevenness and peculiarities of the introduction of digital technologies, all experts in this field reflect a common point of view, expressed in a high assessment of the need and importance of digitalization in the socio-economic development of state. According to the author, the digital transformation of economic processes reflects the potentially growing expectations of progressive effects from the introduction of a new (innovative) generation of digital technologies. The consequence of this is that in recent years, a significant number of industry strategies in the field of digital transformation have been adopted in various countries of the world, including Russia. These strategies represent a new stage in the formation and development of the digital economy, which combines the concepts of development of individual digital technologies with their direct implementation.