We at the Research Councils believe that there are many aspects of society and business that could be transformed by the innovative design and use of digital technologies. This has led to the Digital Economy Programme. The Digital Economy is an RCUK Cross-Research Council Programme, led by the EPSRC, but working closely with ESRC, MRC, AHRC and TSB. What is Digital Economy? Digital Economy is t...

Throughout history, the ongoing technological progress has caused the economy to change in many aspects; furthermore, at times it triggered the dawn of a new era. In the 1980s, this happened for the last time and the digital economy has emerged over the last decades. Since then, the significance of approaches to technology enhanced learning (TEL) has increased rapidly. However, the relations be...

We present a novel design for a peer-assisted content distribution system that addresses two key shortcomings of existing proposals. First, our system explicitly identifies the relative demand for files: users are rewarded for sharing more popular content. Second, our system efficiently utilizes network resources, by considering resource constraints explicitly when matching downloaders and uplo...

We examine the drivers of Internet firm survival using a multi-method survival analysis. Based on previous literature on business failure and recent IS research on e-commerce business models, we test the impact of sector-, firmand e-commerce-specific factors on an Internet firm’s duration after its IPO. We first provide a descriptive analysis of Internet firm survival using non-parametric survi...

Technological advances are changing many aspects of business activity and in particular the meaning of distance and geography. Such changes are likely to have profound impact on firms whose activities take place over distance, namely MNEs. Using the motivations for FDI identified in the literature as a theoretical framework, this study examines the motivations of firms producing and selling pro...

The development of the Digital Economy will have a fundamental impact on the structures and processes of economic systems. The paper therefore begins with outlining the general challenges arising in the context of the Digital Economy. It focuses on the relationship between suppliers and customers in the described context. After a more detailed explanation of this, we analyze the challenges for ...