Innovation

The OECD Digital Economy Outlook 2020 examines trends and analyses emerging opportunities and challenges in the digital economy. It highlights how OECD countries and partner economies are taking advantage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the Internet to meet their public policy objectives. Through comparative evidence, it informs policy makers of regulatory practices and policy options to help maximise the potential of the digital economy as a driver for innovation and inclusive growth.
This third edition of the OECD Digital Economy Outlook provides a holistic overview of converging trends, policy developments and data on both the supply and demand sides of the digital economy. It illustrates how the digital transformation is affecting economies and societies. Finally, it provides a special focus on how the COVID-19 pandemic is amplifying opportunities and challenges from the digital transformation.

This report is the result of a collaboration between members of the World Economic Forum Council on Advanced Manufacturing and Production. It summarizes the main findings of work conducted on the application of advanced manufacturing and digital technologies on future production and supply-chain models. The applications set out in this paper highlight the importance of collaborations across supply-chain partners as crucial to technology adoption and exploitation. Five advanced manufacturing transformations are presented that offer real-world examples of how advanced manufacturing and digital technologies are driving new supply-chain capabilities achieved through supplier-producer-user collaboration. These five transformations, while not aiming to be exhaustive, demonstrate 1) smart manufacturing, 2) flexible supply chains, 3) authentication and consumer engagement, 4) supply chain visibility and resilience, 5) remanufacturing, reduce, reuse and recycling.

While cyberspace continues to enable tremendous commercial, humanitarian, and national security opportunities, it also breeds an expanded threat landscape of massive complexity. As innovation and new vulnerabilities emerge apace, responses to novel problems have remained reactive. A joint report by the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative and Emergent Futures Lab challenges this moribund thinking by developing three Alternate Cybersecurity Futures, scenarios to provide insight into what the future may look like and how policy can move from adaptation to critically urgent evolution. These futures are meant to spark a strategic dialogue and we hope others will expand upon and between them.

This report proposes an innovative focus on cybersecurity incentives for the investment community. Investors in innovation and technology-driven companies have a responsibility to ensure that cybersecurity is given priority in the early stages of product development. By ensuring cybersecurity from the outset – including features like security-by-design and security-by-default – investors can increase the likelihood of company success in the long term, promote more durable technology and improve overall cyber resilience. This report proposes principles for investors that will raise their internal cybersecurity awareness and offers a complete framework enabling investors to assess the cybersecurity preparedness of their target company.

The technologies on the list, which is curated by members of the Forum’s Expert Network, are selected against a number of criteria. In addition to promising major benefits to societies and economies, they must also be disruptive, attractive to investors and researchers, and expected to have achieved considerable scale within five years. “From income inequality to climate change, technology will play a critical role in finding solutions to many of the challenges our world faces today. This year’s emerging technologies demonstrate the rapid pace of human innovation and offer a glimpse into what a sustainable, inclusive future will look like,” said Jeremy Jurgens, Chief Technology Officer at the World Economic Forum. “Technologies that are emerging today will soon be shaping the world tomorrow and well into the future – with impacts to economies and to society at large. Now that we are well into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it’s critical that we discuss and ensure that humanity is served by these new innovations so that we can continue to prosper,” said Mariette DiChristina, Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American, and chair of the Emerging Technologies Steering Committee.

Rapid innovation and lowering costs have dramatically increased access to electronic products and digital technology, with many benefits. This has led to an increase in the use of electronic devices and equipment. The unintended consequence of this is a steep growth of electronic and electrical waste: e-waste. E-waste is now the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. It is estimated this waste stream reached 48.5 million tonnes in 2018. Globally, society only deals with 20% of e-waste appropriately and there is little data on what happens to the rest, which for the most part ends up in landfill, or is disposed of by informal workers in poor conditions. Yet e-waste is worth at least $62.5 billion annually, which is more than the gross domestic product (GDP) of most countries. Changes in technology such as cloud computing and the internet of things (IoT) could hold the potential to “dematerialize” the electronics industry. The rise of service business models and better product tracking and takeback could lead to global circular value chains. Material efficiency, recycling infrastructure and scaling up the volume and quality of recycled materials to meet the needs of electronics supply chains will all be essential. If the sector is supported with the right policy mix and managed in the right way, it could lead to the creation of millions of decent jobs worldwide. A new vision for the production and consumption of electronic and electrical goods based on the circular economy is needed. It is easy for e-waste to be framed as a post-consumer problem, but the issue encompasses the lifecycle of the devices everyone uses. Designers, manufacturers, investors, traders, miners, raw material producers, consumers, policy-makers and others have a crucial role to play in reducing waste, retaining value within the system, extending the economic and physical life of an item, as well as its ability to be repaired, recycled and reused.

Using large scale EIB Investment Survey evidence for 2016 covering 8,900 non-financial firms from all size and age classes across all sectors and all EU Member States, we identify different innovation profiles based on a firm’s R&D investment and/or innovation activities. We find that “basic” firms – i.e. firms that do not engage in any type of R&D or innovation – are more common among young SMEs, while innovators –i.e. firms that do R&D and introduce new products, processes or services- are more often old and large firms. This hold particularly for “leading innovators”, ie those introducing innovations new to the market. To further explore why young SMEs are not more active in innovation, we explore their access to finance. We confirm that young small leading innovators are the most likely to be credit constrained. Grants seem to at least partly addressing the external financing access problem for leading innovators, but not for young SMEs.

Le secteur des métaux non ferreux est un fournisseur incontournable d’autres secteurs majeurs de l’industrie française. Par les innovations technologiques qu’il porte, il met également à disposition de ces secteurs aval des solutions innovantes et apparaît ainsi comme un maillon essentiel de la chaîne industrielle. Les métaux non ferreux, qu’il s’agisse des métaux traditionnels ou à haute intensité technologiques (dits high-tech), trouvent leurs applications dans de nombreux secteurs industriels comme les matériels de transport, le bâtiment, l'aéronautique, l'automobile, les matériels électriques et électroniques, les équipements domestiques et emballages ou encore les industries mécaniques. Plus particulièrement, l’utilisation des métaux high-tech (ou les alliages utilisant ces métaux) permet d’induire des caractéristiques mécaniques et physico-chimiques propices aux innovations technologiques et aux technologies de rupture. L’industrie française des métaux non ferreux a connu, durant cette dernière décennie, des évolutions marquantes de ses marchés et un contexte concurrentiel mondial renforcé qui ont conduit à de profondes recompositions de son appareil productif. Au niveau mondial, le déplacement du centre de gravité de la croissance économique vers les pays émergents et le ralentissement de la croissance de la demande lié à la crise économique ont engendré, en France et en Europe, une baisse d’activité de la quasi-totalité des secteurs consommateurs de métaux non ferreux. L’analyse prospective à l’horizon de 15-20 ans fait ressortir différents facteurs qui devraient agir sur les marchés des métaux non ferreux. En termes de volumes, les applications dans les infrastructures bénéficieront d’une croissance rapide dans les pays émergents, alors que dans les pays matures, les marchés reposeront davantage sur des remplacements, des améliorations, des adaptations à de nouveaux modes de consommation et production, avec une croissance plus faible. Concernant les biens de consommation et d’équipement des ménages, tels que l’automobile, la croissance mondiale en volume sera principalement tirée par les pays émergents. Dans les pays matures, les facteurs de croissance dépendront notamment des réponses et solutions qui pourront être apportées aux besoins de nouveaux modes de consommation et de production, tels que l’optimisation et l’efficacité des matériaux, les développements technologiques combinés à la montée en puissance des technologies de l’information et de la communication (TIC), ou encore la capacité de satisfaire aux exigences environnementales. Les acteurs français disposent d’atouts et de potentialités pour réaliser des productions à haute intensité technologique et à forte valeur ajoutée. Le défi pour les acteurs français est alors d’acquérir ou de confirmer un avantage compétitif par rapport à des concurrents, y compris issus de pays émergents, prompts à progresser sur une courbe d’expérience comparable et à rivaliser sur des créneaux identiques. Dans le domaine des métaux non ferreux, la diffusion de nouvelles technologies et/ou de nouveaux matériaux bénéficie du rôle actif de quelques donneurs d’ordres, acteurs institutionnels et centres techniques. Globalement, les projets et les initiatives émergent en ordre dispersé, et une meilleure coordination au niveau national serait souhaitable. De nombreux métaux non ferreux (cuivre, aluminium, métaux précieux et high-tech) bénéficient de l’apport des TIC, et notamment de l’électronique embarquée, tous types de véhicules confondus (aéronefs, trains, automobiles, etc.).