Harald Øverby - Introduction to Digital Economics: Foundations, Business Models and Case Studies (Classroom Companion: Business)

The Classroom Companion series in Business features foundational and introductory books aimed at students to learn the core concepts, fundamental methods, theories and tools of the subject. The books offer a firm foundation for students preparing to move towards advanced learning. Each book follows a clear didactic structure and presents easy adoption opportunities for lecturers.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/16374

Originally published by Create Space Independent, Scotts Valley, CA, USA, in 2018 with ISBN 978-1986751391

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

It is my great pleasure to introduce this important book. While the impacts of digital technologies are growing with far-reaching magnitudes, the academic field of digital economics is still in its inception and definition phases, with even fewer textbooks. This book fills an important void by bringing together theories from economics, management science, system dynamics, and business modelling to provide overview and structure to this emerging field. The book will be useful both for graduate and under-graduate courses, and for researchers who wish to have a salient overview and introduction.

The book has a clear pedagogical structure and flow, where each chapter features abstract, learning objectives, definitions, logical partition with sub-headings, theory presentations, cases, boxes, and concluding set of Q&A. With this lay-out, the book is immediately appealing for parsing and selection of chapters that seem more interesting. The order between chapters is also clear, one building upon each other, starting with the technologies, and moving step by step into more and more sophisticated topics. Toward the end, there are chapters with quite advanced mathematical modelling, together with some specific application areas such as big data and network neutrality. The final chapter provides an overview of digital regulation, as a final integrating chapter that brings to bear many of the economic analysis tools presented earlier.

While organizing and summarizing theories of relevance for the topic, the book also has some important intellectual contributions and perspectives. Among others, the book emphasizes the integration of Porters strategy framework with the value network perspective which serves to integrate both traditional strategy analysis with new theories relating to value creation in digital networks. Moreover, the integration of the multi-sided platform theories with the value network theory and network effects is an important way forward to operationalize the multi-sided platform theory further. The authors have developed a set of excellent illustrations to further illustrate the importance of the various relations between multi-sided platforms with other theories and constructs. The book also provides a helpful historical context by referring the readers to origins and authors of important concepts, such as ecosystems and path dependencies, and by so doing providing teasers for further reading.

In summary, the book provides an integrated overview of a field of increasing importance and has done so in a very pedagogical fashion. The book should be a welcome contribution for courses in strategy, business, and digital economics. The book is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate level engineering students, taking advantage of the advanced mathematical modelling.

I give this book my heartfelt recommendation and invite the reader to enjoy this tour of digital economics, in the company of two experts and enthusiastic guides!

This book is an introduction to digital economics. It is highly cross-disciplinary and draws upon knowledge from several academic disciplines such as telecommunications, computer science, management science, business modeling, economics, and mathematics to explain the digital economy. To fully comprehend digital economics, it is important to understand how the information and communication technology (ICT) is underpinning all digital businesses.

The six biggest companies by capitalization (by 2021) are all major stakeholders in the digital economy. The digital economy can no longer be ignored as an oddity in economy theory. On the contrary, the economics of digital goods and services has become a key element in the understanding of how the world economy works.

Several topics covered by this book are included in the curricula taught at several business and economics schools around the world. This book is unique as it approaches topics in digital economics from a technology point of view. We believe that this is essential since digital economics is a result of the evolution of information and communications technologies, and not vice versa.

The field of digital economics is complex and cannot be fully understood using theories from traditional micro-economics alone. It is necessary to adopt existing theories using knowledge from system dynamics, management science, and business modelling.

We wrote this book to support the growing community of students and practitioners with textbook material that links the theoretical foundations of digital economics with practical examples and case studies.