Digital Transformation and Internationalization: a Complexity Approach

The digital economy has strongly impacted the complexity of the worldwide economy. The rapid advancement of digitization and the impact of digitalization have led to different dynamics of competition and new venture creation. Diffusion of digital technologies (big data, artificial intelligence, internet of things, cloud computing and so on), far from being merely an IT evolution, is greatly impacting firm activities, business models, boundaries, cultures and value chains. Such effects are increasingly assuming an international dimension. This explains why the research field of digital tranformation is emerging. On the one hand, the new landscape strengthens the microenvironment of companies whose understanding of markets and input is improving day by day thanks to data. On the other, it increases the complexity of the external environment as it becomes faster every moment. This increased ability to read and interpret data has an impact on the external environment which, inevitably, becomes more complex. Large corporations and new start-ups have to constantly adapt their business models as rapidly as possible to react to this change which big data and artificial intelligence are imposing upon the market. The external environment moves so fast that companies can no longer rely only on their own forces to react and create an offer that is attractive. They need the support of an external, open, digital ecosystem to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage: open source becomes the best option to survive. Big data and the digital ecosystem make it possible for companies of all sizes to work and compete internationally and create scalable products. In this perspective, big corporations such as IBM are promoting the creation of digital ecosystems, thereby offering a mutual benefit: for the big corporation itself, the ecosystem enhances technology development; for small companies and start-ups it allows them to create and develop. In this paper we observe the phenomenon of digital transformation through the lens of the “economics of complexity” (Section 2). We start with analyzing the phenomenon, identifying its defining characteristics (section 3). Then we focus on three of the main – partially overlapping – elements of digital transformation impacting firm activities and the economy as a whole: cognitive computing, artificial intelligence and data mining (Section 4). Indeed in the new era of digital transformation companies' competitiveness depends no longer on whether they are digital but on whether they learn from their own data. We then introduce the Italian Cognitive Computing Community, aiming to promote the use of cognitive computing technologies and develop new professional skills in line with the digital transformation of the economy (Section 5), and digital ecosystems as the new prevailing organizational mode in the context of current digitalized scenario (Section 6). Finally, we conduct a literature review covering works and research perspectives dealing at the same time with the issues of digitazion/digitalization and internationalization (Section 7). This is followed by some concluding remarks.