Transformative direction of innovation and measurement of uncaptured GDP in the digital economy
Abstract
The Internet has dramatically changed business dynamics and our daily lives
by providing extraordinary services and welfare never anticipated before.
However, productivity in industrialized countries has confronted an apparent
decline. The ICT advanced firms and countries are suffering with low marginal
productivity of their ICT investments. This reveals the two-faced nature of ICT
and productivity paradox in the digital economy.
With the progression of technology and transition from commodity-
oriented to information society, the consumers’ preferences are believed to be
shifted beyond economic value. The digitization has promoted the free and un-
monetized consumption of digital goods and services that provides utility and
happiness to consumers, but it cannot necessarily be captured through GDP
(gross domestic product) statistics. This research conceptualizes it as “uncaptured GDP” and develops a new method for its measurement. The comparison
of two ICT advanced countries reveals their contrary ICT-driven development
trajectories, “happiness-oriented” in Finland versus “growth-oriented” in Singapore. It signifies how nations and industries use technology differently to
create their unique competitiveness.
The digitization of taxi and music industries is studied to analyze the impact of ICT-driven disruptive innovations on traditional industries and their
consolidation challenges with institutions. The national level analyses explore
useful insights for developing ICT-driven competitiveness through higher education (20 countries) and gender equality (44 countries) in the digital economy.
These results reveals, how industries and countries are harnessing the potential
of untapped and non-economic resources so-called “soft value innovation” to
create unique competitiveness in the digital economy. With the analyses of
transformative direction of innovation (by 500 ICT firms), it is anticipated that
the role of soft value innovation will further increase in addressing the challenges of digital economy such as declining marginal productivity of technology, increasing role of uncaptured GDP and intense competition.
Main Author
Format
Theses
Doctoral thesis
Published
2017
Series
Subjects
ISBN
978-951-39-7296-7
Publisher
University of Jyväskylä
The permanent address of the publication
https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-39-7296-7Käytä tätä linkitykseen.
ISSN
1456-5390
Language
English
Published in
Jyväskylä studies in computing