Ongoing Digital Revolution Research Articles

Embedded finance: assessing the benefits, use case, challenges and interest over time

PurposeThis paper presents an overview of embedded finance. It identifies the applications, use case examples, benefits and challenges of embedded finance. The paper also analyzes global interest in embedded finance and compares it with interest in related finance concepts such as open finance, open banking, decentralized finance, financial innovation, Fintech and digital finance.Design/methodology/approachGranger causality test and two-stage least square regression were used to assess interest over time in embedded finance.FindingsThe empirical result show that interest in embedded finance increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States, the United Kingdom and India witnessed the highest interest in embedded finance compared to other countries. There is bi-directional Granger causality between interest in information about embedded finance and interest in information about financial innovation. There is uni-directional Granger causality between interest in information about embedded finance and interest in information about digital finance and open finance. The findings also reveal that interest in decentralized finance and open finance are significant determinants of interest in embedded finance. On the other hand, interest in embedded finance is a significant determinant of interest in digital finance, decentralized finance, Fintech and open banking. Also, interest in embedded finance is significantly correlated with interest in digital finance, decentralized finance, open banking and Fintech.Originality/valuePresently, there is little academic interest in embedded finance despite the fact that embedded finance is part of the on-going digital finance revolution. This paper fills this gap in the literature by assessing the benefits, use case, challenges of embedded finance.

Uses and practices of digital services in a situation of mobility: evolution versus revolution? The case of the Champs Elysées

ABSTRACT The ongoing digital revolution is transforming economic production systems as well as our daily lives. If the expectancies in terms of innovation and opportunities are very high on the supply side, little is known about the effective uses of digital tools by customers and the impact on them and their consumption patterns, especially in a situation of mobility. Tourism for example has been tremendously impacted by the digital transformation. It has changed the way people plan, book and travel, but also the way the stakeholders communicate on their destination. But it is also expected that mobile and wireless technologies change the tourist experience of the destination. Mobile devices could induce change in tourist behaviour at the last minute in situ. By using an analysis in terms of services, we suggest that suppliers and tourists in territories coproduce M-tourism services. These services depend on the tourist behaviour but also on the supply, which is available in the destination. Drawing on a survey conducted on the Champs Elysées in Paris in 2018, this paper analyses how different types of people (tourists, residents, workers, etc.) are using these digital services.

What will drive global economic growth in the digital age?

Abstract This paper provides a theoretical investigation of possible sources of long-run economic growth in the future. Historically, in the industrial era and during the ongoing digital revolution (which began approximately in the 1980s) the main engine of global economic growth has been research and development (R&D), translating into systematic labor-augmenting technological progress and trend growth in labor productivity. If in the future all essential production or R&D tasks will eventually be subject to automation, though, the engine of growth will be shifted to the accumulation of programmable hardware (capital), and R&D will lose its prominence. Economic growth will then accelerate, no longer constrained by the scarce human input. By contrast, if some essential production and R&D tasks will never be fully automatable, then R&D may forever remain the main growth engine, and the human input may forever remain the scarce, limiting factor of global growth. Additional studied mechanisms include the accumulation of R&D capital and hardware-augmenting technical change.

Bio‐economy for sustainable growth in developing countries: The case of oil palm in Malaysia and Indonesia

AbstractMalaysia and Indonesia are two vivid examples of economic development built upon land exploitation. The concept of ‘bio‐economy’ illustrates a pathway for countries to move on to a more sustainable course of development by creating added value downstream and diversifying away from primary production. Growing a local oleochemical industry was naturally the first step for Malaysia and Indonesia as the world's largest palm‐oil producers. This was extended to biofuel production, which first aimed for export revenues. The biofuel sector later became an important buffer for the palm‐oil industry to absorb excessive stock with domestic blending targets during low price periods. Meanwhile, the utilization of biomass for power generation has grown significantly for both exports and local use. Converting biomass into second‐generation biofuels and other advanced bio‐based materials has also attracted great interest from foreign investors. However, the high cost of biomass mobilization has limited the deployment of advanced biorefineries. One interesting option is to integrate waste management with the production of high‐value bioenergy and biomaterials, adopting the model of a multi‐feedstock biorefinery. While several bio‐based industrial clusters were set up to attract investment with the consolidation of infrastructure surrounding major ports, more effort is still needed to explore and identify feasible business models with optimized supply chains. Cross‐border cooperation may open new doors for building regional bio‐based value chains. The ongoing digital revolution may provide breakthroughs in chain integration and technology deployment. © 2022 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Rola kompetencji cyfrowych w procesie glottodydaktycznym z perspektywy przedstawicieli społeczności digital natives

Digital competences, involving the responsible and critical use of information and communication technologies in various areas of our lives, are today one of the key competences of the twenty-first century. In the face of the ongoing digital revolution, their importance in various fields of education is growing as well. The aim of the article is to show the role of digital competences in language education from the perspective of the modern generation – active users of modern technologies. Based on the theoretical aspects of the discussed issues, surveys were conducted the main goal of which was the analysis of personal opinions of learners (representatives of the digital natives community) on the role of digital competences in various activities of the glottodidactic process. The research was conducted among students of neophilological specialties of the bachelor’s programme at the University of Silesia. The scope of use and assessment of the usefulness of digital competences in the process of teaching-learning foreign languages and the definition and self-assessment of own e-skills was of particular interest. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the research material confirmed the important role of e-skills in developing both communication and language competences and learning strategies, also from the perspective of learners. Given the significant usefulness of digital competences in didactic activities, improving them is undoubtedly one of the priority tasks of modern education.

Moving towards digital platforms revolution? Antecedents, determinants and conceptual framework for offline B2B networks

Fostering productive networking relationships with organizations inside and outside the value chain increases the enterprise’s competitiveness. Today, the ongoing digital platforms revolution is facilitating these networked relationships. Nevertheless, despite recent technological advancements facilitating business interactions, there is a considerable lack of clarity about how and why offline B2B networks implement digital platforms solutions. In addition, the antecedents and determinants that drive their engagement are poorly understood in the literature. To address these challenges, this article examines the antecedents and determinants influencing the decisions of 1,704 offline networks (business associations, chambers of commerce, and employer’s unions) to implement a new multisided digital market platform (MDMP). Mixed methods research, including semi-structured interviews and a large-scale survey were conducted. Overall, findings unveil that the knowledge on digital platforms’ potentials and acceptance levels remain limited. Shared and unique antecedents and determinants for MDMP implementation by business associations, chambers of commerce, and employer’s unions emerged. The article also proposed a novel conceptual framework representing the mechanisms influencing the implementation of MDMPs. Grounded in the large-scale survey, we develop substantive theories on the factors influencing the decision of business associations, chambers of commerce, and employer’s unions to implement MDMPs. These theories identify and describe the interrelated paradoxes that these three categories of B2B networks need to address when moving towards the digital platforms revolution. The new managerial, theoretical, and policy insights originating from this study advance the general knowledge in the field.

Digital platforms and ecosystems: remarks on the dominant organizational forms of the digital age

ABSTRACT What are the principal consequences on organization and management of the ongoing Digital Revolution? This essay examines how value can be created and captured in fundamentally new ways thanks to digital innovation. I propose that digital platform firms and their ecosystems are the emblematic organizational form of the digital age. I present the main implications of the rise of digital platforms and ecosystems on competition and innovation. The paradox of digital platforms in their current organizational form is that while distributed patterns of value creation characterize the circumstances that allowed them to emerge, the business models they have adopted have led to a centralized modality of value capture. This has given rise to salient instances of digital platform firms’ abuse of economic power over their ecosystem members and to widespread concerns on digital platforms firms’ abuse of power on other dimensions, including privacy and labour relations. In my conclusion, I highlight the importance of future research on ecosystems’ governance and call for a careful examination of a platform firms’ responsibilities in society.

Computational personality assessment

Computational methods have increased the objectivity of measures of human behavior and positioned personality science to benefit from the ongoing digital revolution. In this review, we define and discuss computational personality assessment (CPA), a measurement process that uses computational technologies to obtain estimates of personality. We briefly review some of the most promising sources of data currently used for CPA: mobile sensing, digital footprints from social media, images, language, and experience sampling. We present a concise overview of key findings, discuss the promise and opportunities of CPA (e.g., moving towards objective measures of personality, obtaining new insights from big data), and highlight important limitations and challenges in the development and application of CPA (e.g., establishing reliability and validity, selecting appropriate ground truth criterion, assessing affect and cognition, implications for ethics and privacy). We conclude with our perspective on how CPA could change our understanding of individual differences.

Wide application feasibility report on graphene

In 2005, Dennard scaling, which had hitherto delivered the performance enhancement of integrated circuit (IC) chips, completely collapsed. Hence, the need for new materials and material research emerged. Two-dimensional (2D) graphene emerged as a device material, and two-dimensional hexagonal boron nitride (BN) has emerged as the ideal substrate material. For the ongoing digital revolution to be sustained, petabit/second and exabit/second transmission links are needed. Graphene technology has matured to the level where functional graphene ICs on the wafer scale can be implemented, such as frequency multipliers, high-frequency graphene analog amplifiers and quaternary digital modulation circuits. These functional graphene ICs can be fabricated at the wafer scale because of the development of the imperfection-immune paradigm called very-large-scale-integration-compatible metallic carbon (C) nanotube removal technique. To harness the exotic properties of graphene nanomaterials in real-life applications at the macro scale, three-dimensional graphene-based monoliths have been developed, which could become the basis of future batteries and solar cells. Terahertz graphene chips will herald peta- and exabit rate optical fiber communication, which is the answer to the large data workload of the Internet. Graphene is emerging as an important thermoelectric material that is capable of converting temperature difference into electric current.

Expanding conservation culturomics and iEcology from terrestrial to aquatic realms.

The ongoing digital revolution in the age of big data is opening new research opportunities. Culturomics and iEcology, two emerging research areas based on the analysis of online data resources, can provide novel scientific insights and inform conservation and management efforts. To date, culturomics and iEcology have been applied primarily in the terrestrial realm. Here, we advocate for expanding such applications to the aquatic realm by providing a brief overview of these new approaches and outlining key areas in which culturomics and iEcology are likely to have the highest impact, including the management of protected areas; fisheries; flagship species identification; detection and distribution of threatened, rare, and alien species; assessment of ecosystem status and anthropogenic impacts; and social impact assessment. When deployed in the right context with awareness of potential biases, culturomics and iEcology are ripe for rapid development as low-cost research approaches based on data available from digital sources, with increasingly diverse applications for aquatic ecosystems.

Introduction to this special section: Machine learning and AI

There is an ongoing digital revolution motivated by the data-driven scientific discovery paradigm. Geophysics has a mixed level of readiness, with some of these technologies already applied, research still emerging, and new opportunities to be discovered.

Education, Quality and the Digital Transformation

Quality of education from the point of view of different stakeholders is considered taking into account the ongoing digital transformation revolution with the unprecedented speed and scale of changes. A quality of a student’s life added by an academic program is believed to be the most comprehensive characteristic of the quality of the program. A short list of key requirements for higher education academic programs to keep their high quality under digital transformation is proposed. It is noted that academic programs need to maintain a relatively slow-changing crossdisciplinary fundamental theoretical core in the relevant field of knowledge, and develop project and research competencies. In order to adapt to technological changes in the professional sphere, a need for continuous design of courses to meet anticipatory professional competence packages is pointed out. These courses may form a rapidly changing part of the program for individual educational trajectories. The necessity to develop universal competencies in the field of information and communication technologies, as well as skills for using methods of pattern recognition theory, which is fundamental for deep machine learning, is noted. Possibilities of using both Mass Open Online Courses (MOOC) and Online Program Management (OPM) services in academic programs are considered.

What Polanyi Teaches Us about the Platform Economy and Structural Change

The rise of the platform economy marks the latest phase in the ongoing digital revolution. Indeed, the platform is to this digital era what the factory was to the industrial era, both a symbol and an organizing mechanism. Gernot Grabher and Jonas König (2020) used Karl Polanyi’s analysis of what he termed the “great transformation” to frame the rise of platform economy. The platform economy is remarkable as it confirms Polanyi’s (and Marx’s before him) insight that the reach of the market is based upon increased commodification as it has been able to reach into ever more parts of social life. We introduced the term “platform economy” in 2015 because we recognized that the digital platforms were changing the dynamics of capitalist accumulation —- an analysis framed by regulationist school of political economy. The intuition was that the socio-technical innovation of digital online platforms was the critical fulcrum for an economic restructuring that would rewire the flows of data and ultimately money and power. The firms we have termed the “mega-platforms”, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, have become the most valuable and powerful firms in the world. Importantly, the reach of these platforms is global and yet local and personal. Moreover, this platform power has only been reinforced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Can an unconventional Socio-technical System approach open the way to new solutions and new understanding?

Socio-technical System Design (STSD) was developed as an alternative to the prevailing Taylorist organisational design principles focusing on specialisation and standardisation. STSD emphasised quality of work and has thus been described as a strategy for “simple organisation and complex jobs”. This may sound like a partial strategy for developing holistic, meaningful jobs. However, it is as much about developing efficient organisations with interactions between people and technology that increase company competitiveness.STSD has taken different directions in different countries/geographic areas. All these directions emphasise holistic job design and employee participation. However, approaches to achieving holistic job design and to the role of employee participation vary. The ongoing digital revolution, often labelled Industry 4.0, is rapidly changing the conditions for work in general. Tasks that were previously manual are being automated, and communications and information are being made available to an extent not seen until now. In this landscape, it is necessary to consider whether we have suitable approaches for facing the challenges posed by these technological developments.In this paper, which considers two strands in the tradition of STSD theory and a case study, I will examine the need to introduce a familiar but rarely discussed or used STSD approach to major technological and organisational changes

Internet of Things and the Environment

Abstract Along with the well-known attributes of mankind's future (sustainable, socially inclusive, environmentally-friendly), the last few years we was witnessing the appearance of a new digital attribute. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the ongoing digital revolution that attempts to put into practice all the benefits of explosive development of digital technologies and associated communication capabilities. The huge amount of information collected by computerized planning, production management, technology risk practice and health hazards monitoring has to serve both economic development, advanced management resources, financial profit, and a better protected environment. The IoT Revolution is in its early stages and its focus is on assuring the associated infrastructure as quickly as possible (hardware, BigData software, sensor systems, protected sensitive data, safe communications). The first results are expected in optimizing and streamlining technologies in the management of non-renewable resources. It is appreciated that by 2030, the value added by IoT will amount to about $14 trillion in industry alone. But it would be a mistake to stop the benefits of IoT there. The authors devise a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Traits) analysis, and evaluate the benefits and risks of aligning environmental/social policies to the IoT, proposing a brevity of measures to ensure that the sustainability is considered in the IoT implementation at all stages and at all levels: enterprise, industrial, geographical area, global region. The IoT vision and mission are presented in light of this approach, strategic objectives and important action directions. It also highlights the ethical issues related to the development of an interconnected world through IoT (where unrestrained access to information is stopped, who and for whose control this access has been made, etc.). The terms IoE (Internet of Environment) and IoS (Internet of Sustainability) are suggested.

Opening Futures for Nigerian Education – Integrating Educational Technologies with Indigenous Knowledge and Practices

This paper highlights some key historical perspectives and antecedents of African Indigenous knowledge (AIK) and practices while identifying ‘open’ futures and opportunities for the application of digital technologies for educational opportunities that build on this cultural base. The role and negative impact of colonialism in the under-development of AIK is examined in this context together with the impact of post-colonial and contemporary corruption in further undermining the value of Indigenous knowledge systems. Two key concepts are identified as a counterpoint to this: the resilience of AIK and ‘local wisdom’ and the openness underpinning much of the ongoing digital revolution. This natural alignment can help guide the integration of Indigenous-based knowledge and practices and the deployment of open and distance learning in the re-birth of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS). Openness is a pivotal concept here for it is integral to both the architecture of the Web and in its ongoing evolution. Given the identified opportunities associated with digital technology, and despite the challenges, it is argued that there is an unequivocal need for AIKS to explore the advantages of open education resources and practices in promoting this rebirth that is also consistent with modern science and technologies in Africa and beyond.

Class‐specific variable selection in high‐dimensional discriminant analysis through Bayesian Sparsity

AbstractAlthough the ongoing digital revolution in fields such as chemometrics, genomics, or personalized medicine gives hope for considerable progress in these areas, it also provides more and more high‐dimensional data to analyze and interpret. A common usual task in those fields is discriminant analysis, which however may suffer from the high dimensionality of the data. The recent advances, through subspace classification or variable selection methods, allowed to reach either excellent classification performances or useful visualizations and interpretations. Obviously, it is of great interest to have both excellent classification accuracies and a meaningful variable selection for interpretation. This work addresses this issue by introducing a subspace discriminant analysis method which performs a class‐specific variable selection through Bayesian sparsity. The resulting classification methodology is called sparse high‐dimensional discriminant analysis (sHDDA). Contrary to most sparse methods which are based on the Lasso, sHDDA relies on a Bayesian modeling of the sparsity pattern and avoids the painstaking and sensitive cross‐validation of the sparsity level. The main features of sHDDA are illustrated on simulated and real‐world data. In particular, an exemplar application to cancer characterization based on medical imaging using radiomic feature extraction is proposed.

The impact of technological progress on labour markets: policy challenges

This paper gives an overview of current thinking by economists about the consequences of ongoing technological progress for labour markets, and discusses policy implications. In economics, the impact of technological progress on labour markets is understood by the following two channels: (i) the nature of interactions between differently skilled workers and new technologies affecting labour demand and (ii) the equilibrium effects of technological progress through consequent changes in labour supply and product markets. The paper explains how the ongoing Digital Revolution is characterized by a complex interplay between worker skills and digital capital in the workplace, and consequent changes in job mobility for workers and in output prices affecting consumer demand for goods and services. In particular, it explains how current worker–technology interactions and the equilibrium effects they entail combine to create economy-wide job polarization with winners and losers from ongoing technological progress. The paper therefore concludes by discussing a set of policy interventions to ensure that the benefits of the Digital Revolution are broadly shared.

Job polarization: an historical perspective

This paper uses historical labour market data for Belgium for the period 1846–2011 to illustrate how the employment impacts of the ongoing Digital Revolution after 1980 compare to those of the Second Industrial Revolution before 1980. Our analyses show that the period 1846–1947 was characterized by economy-wide skill-upgrading due to an increase in the demand for skilled relative to unskilled workers because of skill-biased technological change (SBTC). The period 1947–81 is characterized by particularly high labour market turbulence, in part due to a gradual switch from economy-wide skill-upgrading to job polarization. Consequently, the impact of the ongoing Digital Revolution on labour markets after 1980 is not uniquely characterized by exceptionally high labour market turbulence but by the nature of changes in the composition of jobs, namely a process of job polarization. To explain job polarization, the paper discusses the hypothesis of Routine-Biased Technological Change (RBTC) that has recently emerged in the academic literature.

Reinventing the Teaching Machine for Our Time: Reading Thinking Literature across Continents

Abstract Teachers of literature around the world are confronted with a stark reality: shrinking reading public of literature in society, and dwindling enrollment of literary majors in colleges and universities due to the ongoing digital revolution and pressures from STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) subjects. The diminishing interest in literature is an undeniable fact recognized in both Western and Eastern literatures. It is under these not-so-rosy circumstances for literary studies that the author of this article reads with great interest the book, Thinking Literature across Continents coauthored by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller, and wishes to join them in discussing the fate and future of literature in the age of globalization and telecommunication. Reflecting on the conceptual and practical issues identified by the book, the author also offers his own observations and ideas on the current conditions of literature and suggests practical strategies to cope with the predicament faced by literary studies in our time.