ABSTRACT
Measuring the digital economy is a task that is approached in almost every study or analysis using quantitative methods. Such tools make it possible to assess the degree of digitalization and the development of the digital economy, but they ignore many areas of the socio-economic and sometimes also technological environment that dynamically changes due to the widespread use of cutting-edge technologies. Moreover, the methodologies available nowadays generate challenges resulting from the time delay of the analysed data in relation to the phenomena in the real sphere. The emerging new methods of monitoring processes in the digital economy use not only artificial intelligence or big data analyses but also a wide range of technologies offered by the digital economy itself. The methodology of this new approach is employed more and more frequently in many research projects but has not been used on a large scale to date. The new approach already allows to eliminate many imperfections of commonly used quantitative methods. The chapter presents the potential of three of them: big data analysis of unstructured data, analysis based on Google Trends used in many scientific studies and beacon technology which has new applications, e.g., in monitoring the work environment in Industry 4.0.
