Digitalization, Digital Transformation and Sustainability in the Global Economy

It is still not so long ago. Even in the second half of the last century, there was no shortage of forecasts predicting a bright future for workers in the developed world as a result of the use of new technologies, especially automation: higher productivity with considerably less working time and, of course, more time for the essential things of life.

A consensus mechanism is at the core of each distributed ledger technology. This paper provides a brief overview of the two most prominent consensus protocols from the blockchain universe, namely proof-of-work and proof-of-stake. We describe the fundamentals from a design perspective, highlight some crucial differences between the protocols and discuss their implications for the validity and security of the blockchain. The paper concludes by pointing to Byzantine-Fault-Tolerance consensus, which in the future may become a promising alternative to established consensus mechanisms.

Blockchain technology allowing mass tokenization of assets represents the fundamental element of the ongoing industrial revolution. It helps asset owners to draft unique and tailored product offerings with access to broad groups of investors, exit opportunities and limited risk of fraud. Nevertheless, potential hazards to the process and the very concept exist. The near perspective of a private stablecoin threatening the financial system puts pressure on governments, regulators and the banking system to adopt the revolution rather than oppose it. Tokenization of residential real estate assets opens vast opportunities for inclusion of traditional financial institutions in the process via oracle services, as the quality of data exposed to the asymmetry of information and other factors particular to this market segment is crucial. The author believes that retail banks should further leverage their role in the economy, given their business experience, local expertise or trust, and drafts a concept of the Oracle Bank operating at the crossroads of the physical and digital worlds. This organization should emerge from the unstoppable process of the financial paradigm shift. The discussion on the institutional adoption of residential property tokenization should not be limited to the security of transactions but reflect other aspects of the inevitable redefinition of the banking sector’s role in the emerging token economy, with residential real estate at the focus point of future socio-economic development plans.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) shape our everyday lives both as consumers as well as in the work place. But it is of a rather recent date that ICT also show a more than trivial impact on the political sphere, which is characterized by collective decision-making. Assessing the potential influence of ICT on policies, politics and polities thus is the focus of this paper. ICT are not a set of uniform technologies, but consist of a number of separate technological components which are still evolving. This paper provides a clear conceptual approach in analysing and evaluating the on-going processes of change at the different levels ICT brings about. By applying an evolutionary economics approach, we discuss ICT in regard to its potential with respect to policies, politics and polities. We firstly ask what impact ICT have on policies as the outcome of the policy-making process under given political institutions. Secondly, we analyse what influence ICT have on the policy-making process itself, again assuming given political institutions defining this process. Finally, we also touch the question what impact ICT have on the underlying constitutional institutions defining the polity. We conclude with a summary and an outlook on further research questions.

How can sustainability in the health sector be achieved in a situation where the poor (rightly) demand access to basic health services, the growing global middle class (rightly) demand the right to spend more of their resources on health services, and people in industrialized countries (rightly) demand continued access to high-quality health care? IT systems are often difficult and expensive to design and implement, but the marginal costs of providing additional services are negligible. This is what makes digital health services so powerful in achieving universal health coverage. Digitalization can improve access to health care services, and it can support health insurances in processing large numbers of claims and payments. Both are essential to upscaling health services especially in developing countries.

The digital transformation initiated by digitalization leads to an unstoppable process of change in all areas of society including universities. The effects of the corona pandemic accelerated this process but at the same time uncovered deficits and uncertainties with regarding the correct handling of digitalization. Resulting social phenomena arise that have not been considered in the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Therefore, this scientific contribution provides a solution proposal for the further development of the CSR concept into the Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) concept, taking into account economic, ecological and social aspects of sustainability both in the physical and digital living environment. Building on this, the scenario technique of the German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection is transferred into the university context to offer an example on how universities can responsibly design their future digitalization strategy. While the findings show that the scenario technique can be applied to contexts other than companies, they also show that for the successful transfer of CDR into university practice, a close exchange between universities and the state with regard to a clear allocation of responsibilities must take place.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led to global governmental and societal restrictions of unknown dimensions and required humanity and solidarity to implement major adjustments in nearly every aspect of daily life.

For decades, innovations and their relevance for the organizational performance have been discussed. Past research has ascribed a high impact to top managers as organizational leaders in shaping the organizational innovation activities, but so far has only investigated the spheres of influence in detached approaches. In order to provide a comprehensive framework explaining the multifaceted impact, this paper focuses on four factors identified to specifically shape the top managerial influence: (a) the New St. Galler Management-Model (Rüegg-Sturm, 2003) for the general management, (b) the Innovation Diamond (Cooper, 2005) for the innovation culture, (c) the Model of Leadership Influence on Innovation, (Hunter & Cushenbery, 2011) for the factor of leadership, and (d) the Model on Leader’s Network (Balkundi & Kilduff, 2005) for the network ties. This combined approach provides an important basis for future research as well as management practice. Several implications and the limitations of the framework are addressed.

Online education has become an increasingly important sector within universities. It can provide potential for growth of the institutions and enables learners who are otherwise not able to commit to studies in traditional university programs.

Nature gives us many examples and pictures of networks, symbioses, mutations and adaptations to permanently changing environmental conditions. In plants and animals we speak of evolution, in economics we use change and challenging processes.

The aim of this paper is to assess the digital development of the Russian Federation vis-à-vis the 28 countries of the European Union (EU-28), applying the DEA-type Composite Indicators (DEA/CI) and TOPSIS methods on a dataset comprising the five principal dimensions of the European Commission’s International Digital Economy and Society Index. The paper demonstrates how the DEA/CI and TOPSIS methods can be used to provide a framework for ranking the 29 countries in our dataset in the absence of explicit input criteria or predetermined weights that are required by the classical DEA method and the European Commission’s scoring model. According to these rankings, the Russian Federation demonstrates respectable results in digital economic and social development relative to Eastern and Southern member states of the European Union.

Big data and data analytics are two buzzwords that not only are frequently heard in the context of the digital transformation of society but also are becoming increasingly common in sports. This study demonstrates the changes caused by the use of technologies in the context of big data and sports analytics on the basis of a systematic literature review (SLR) in professional football. Moreover, we analyze to what extent their use has changed and will continue to change the strategies of professional football clubs and their stakeholders. Our results show that big data and sports analytics have become important tools in professional football and can increase the competitiveness of professional football clubs. Nevertheless, our SLR also shows that new technologies have risk potentials for different stakeholder groups.

In the 1920s, innovation, especially assembly line production, led to a new type of corporations and a new form of capitalism that ushered in the age of mass production and mass consumption: Fordism. Digitalisation is again bringing about a radical change in capitalism and the Fordist production structure. Not only has digitalization created an entire new industry, but it is also fundamentally changing the production of classic Fordist industries such as the automotive sector. The Internet of Things, Big Data and artificial intelligence are revolutionising production processes and business models. The more efficient work and production processes generate productivity and welfare gains and promising growth opportunities for the future. However, the flip side of this development is accompanied by an increasingly unequal distribution of these gains. Despite the productivity gains, social inequality is rising in many industrialised countries, increasing the pressured on the welfare and social state through rising debt. This paper provides a theoretical explanation and prediction into how the ongoing digitalisation affects capitalism and what can be expected from this development for the future. The starting point of our consideration is the technological innovation in the course of the digital revolution changes on dominant structure of companies, which is discussed in the first part. In the second part, the consequences of this fourth industrial revolution for the macroeconomic and societal level, in particular the distribution of income, are examined.