Digitization, Epistemic Proximity, and the Education System: Insights from a Bibliometric Analysis

Ugo Fiore,Claudiu Vasile Kifor,Paolo Zanetti,Adrian Florea

doi:10.3390/jrfm14060267

Abstract

Advances in IoT, AI, Cyber-Physical Systems, Computational Intelligence, and Big Data Analytics require organizations and workforce to be able and willing to learn how to interact with digital technology. In organizations, coordination and cooperation between actors with expertise in business and technology is fundamental, but integration is hard without understanding the terminology and problems of the interlocutor. Epistemic proximity becomes prominent, underlining the importance of an education focused on flexibility, willingness to cope with the unknown, and interdisciplinarity. The main goal of this work is to provide a perspective on how the education system is evolving to support organizations in the digitization era through a quantitative analysis of literature. More than 170,000 papers were selected from the Scopus database, matching a wide set of keywords related with innovation, problem solving, and organizational change. Patterns in the co-occurrence of keywords were studied. In addition, similarities and differences in the distribution of relevant themes across disciplinary areas, as well as their evolution since 2000, were analyzed. Academic interest is found to be generally increasing over the years in all disciplines, although considerable fluctuations can be observed. This variation is found to be nonuniform in the macroareas.

Highlights

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The shift in importance from tangible objects to intellectual content and services, as well as the continual restructuring of economies to adapt to constant change, impose reconsidering the desiderata for the education system to enable new business models and maintain competitiveness
Technological innovations are provoking a deep metamorphosis in the education system, that should equip graduates with the skills needed to adapt rapidly to digital technology and use it productively, as well as create the conditions for an easier and more frequent interaction in the context of knowledge transfer and, more broadly, in innovationdriven relationships

Summary

Introduction

Information and knowledge are generated, used and discarded at an unprecedented rate and they determine to a large extent the success of business initiatives. The shift in importance from tangible objects to intellectual content and services, as well as the continual restructuring of economies to adapt to constant change, impose reconsidering the desiderata for the education system to enable new business models and maintain competitiveness. In an industrial setting, automated and interconnected systems on the factory floor bring change in production processes, supply, quality control, and organization. The Factories of the Future (FoFs) need to ensure their personnel has adequate digital skills. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will cause complex and time-consuming tasks to be automated, making several jobs obsolete (Kwilinski et al 2020)

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