ABSTRACT
How did the digital economy come into being? This introductory chapter takes you on a quick ride through the history of the technological revolution that laid the foundations for the digital economy by creating lots of mobile, hyperconnected, and mightily functional digital devices, such as smartphones. Ever more user-friendly devices paved the ground for digitisation, i.e., encoding data in a machine-readable format. Next, we show how the exponential growth in the amount of digitised data, coupled with the advanced analytical tools of artificial intelligence (which we refer to as ‘datafication’) is contributing to the acceleration and intensification of the innovation processes, changing the way societies and economies work. We conclude by describing the digital economy as it has emerged so far through multiple digital transformations, and by emphasising the role of networks that process the growing flood of data.
