Digitalisation

This report examines digitalisation’s effects on science, technology and innovation and the associated consequences for policy. In varied and far-reaching ways, digital technologies are changing how scientists work, collaborate and publish. While examining these developments, this book also assesses the effects of digitalisation on longstanding policy themes, from access to publicly funded research data, to the diffusion of technology and its absorption by firms. New and emerging topics are also explored. These include the roles of artificial intelligence and blockchain in science and production, using digital technology to draw on the collective intelligence of the scientific community, advances in the digitalisation of biotechnology, and possible "dark sides" of digitalisation.

2025 may seem like a long way off. The pressing issues of today necessarily preoccupy European leaderships. But consider this reality: youngsters who are 10 years old today (2009) will be entering the prime of life by 2025. Many millions of 10-year-olds in Europe and around the world are already “digital natives” – born and raised in a world of digital communications. Behind them will come wave upon wave of youngsters, particularly in today’s young emerging societies and economies, with increasing numbers growing up with ever-more powerful digital tools. Indeed, given current trends any distinction between “the digital world” and any other worlds will have become largely academic by 2025. Over the past 15 years digital communications have already transformed the way ever-increasing numbers of us behave individually and collectively in our working and social lives. But this is just the beginning as the pace of change itself accelerates.

While enormous resources are being spent on digital transformation programs by the private sector, the results are underwhelming. According to estimates, this year over $1.2 trillion will be spent by companies worldwide on their digital transformation efforts and yet analysis suggests that only 1% of these efforts will actually achieve or exceed their expectations. The Digital Enterprise: Moving from experimentation to transformation is a practical guide on how to envision, structure, and sequence successful digital transformation efforts. It is an effort by the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Bain & Company, to help senior executives avoid common patterns of failure and ask the right questions.

The platform economy is revolutionizing the banking sector – technology providers and FinTechs are increasingly occupying the customer interface. Retail banks must reposition themselves: Instead of the mostly universal business model they operate now, they need to decide where their future focus will lie. Will they be relationship expert, product expert or technology provider?
Online platforms reach millions of people, enabling more and more products and services to find their way to the customer. This also applies increasingly to financial products, where platform operators are becoming serious competition for retail banks. Thus, banks face a fundamental decision: Do they position themselves in the future at the customer interface and actively design platforms or should they focus on primarily being product providers? Currently most banks are busy digitalizing their existing business model – without any sign of real innovation.

In tandem with the diffusion of computer technologies, labour markets across the OECD have undergone rapid structural transformation. In this paper, we examine i) the impact of technological change on labour market outcomes since the computer revolution of the 1980s, and ii) recent developments in digital technology – including machine learning and robotics – and their potential impacts on the future of work. While it is evident that the composition of the workforce has shifted dramatically over recent decades, in part as a result of technological change, the impacts of digitalisation on the future of jobs are far from certain. On the one hand, accumulating anecdotal evidence shows that the potential scope of automation has expanded beyond routine work, making technological change potentially increasingly labour-saving: according to recent estimates 47 percent of US jobs are susceptible to automation over the forthcoming decades. On the other hand, there is evidence suggesting that digital technologies have not created many new jobs to replace old ones: an upper bound estimate is that around 0.5 percent of the US workforce is employed in digital industries that emerged throughout the 2000s. Nevertheless, at first approximation, there is no evidence to suggest that the computer revolution so far has reduced overall demand for jobs as technologically stagnant sectors of the economy – including health care, government and personal services – continue to create vast employment opportunities. Looking forward, however, we argue that as the potential scope of automation is expanding, many sectors that have been technologically stagnant in the past are likely to become technologically progressive in the future. While we should expect a future surge in productivity as a result, the question of whether gains from increases in productivity will be widely shared depends on policy responses.

Digital skills are vital for individuals and national economies to prosper in a rapidly-changing world, benefiting from the opportunities of digital and remaining resilient to potential risks. More than 90 per cent of jobs in some categories now demand digital skills. Yet in 2016, just 56 per cent of Europeans had adequate digital skills for the world they live in, and 37 per cent of the workforce lacked adequate digital skills. In this project we examined the development and approach of Grow with Google, a project which operates through national programmes matched closely to the contexts and needs of individual countries, in six case study countries (Sweden, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Nigeria) in order to identify key themes and learning to support ongoing good practice in growing a digital skills ecosystem.

Digital technologies have opened up ways of discovering the world, creating an unprecedented access to knowledge and information. Fostering vast communication and connection opportunities, they came with the promise of furthering free and open democratic deliberation. And they have initially delivered: facilitating freedom of expression, enabling easier and faster access to information and greater transparency, boosting media diversity, and creating broader opportunities for civic engagement and political participation. Social media in particular now allow for unparalleled connectivity of a truly interactive nature. They help people stay in touch with friends and family, and find people who share the same passions, interests or beliefs across borders, facilitating new groups and communities of interest to form and grow.

Although there is little argument about the fact that climate change and the digitalisation of the economy are the two main trends that will matter most over the coming decades, to date they have predominantly been considered separately rather than together. The first step towards shaping our future is being able to think about it, however, and the compartmentalisation of research efforts (climate change on the one hand and digitalisation on the other) is unhelpful in this respect. Yet cross-cutting investigations present a challenge since the academic communities and social dynamics underlying both fields of research are entirely distinct. The aim of this Foresight Brief is therefore merely to initiate a debate by analysing the different versions of these two narratives. The author then examines the potential interrelation and ranking of these narratives and explores the emergence of digital and green capitalism and its consequences. The publication concludes by proposing a scenario involving a two-step approach to change.