Page - 161 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

1 Introduction 1.1 Digital Transformation andCreativity In this chapter, wewould like to outline the process of digital transformation and the increasing importance of creativity in the new digital age. Our economy is transforming, and theways inwhichwe create, communicate, work, and collabo- rate are changing (Rogers 2016). Today’s society and business landscape are characterized by trends such as pervasive connectivity, improved performance of information technologies, information abundance, and emergence of big data (Bharadwaj et al. 2013). Accordingly, digital transformation and new business models have also changed consumers’ expectations imposing pressure on tradi- tional companies (Verhoef et al. 2016). In this new digital age, creativity and innovationplayan important role increatingvalue forbusinesses (SousaandRocha 2019).Althoughcreativity and innovationhavealwaysbeen important, their nature is changing in the digital business context (Hinings et al. 2018). Competition betweencompanies isnownotonlybasedon thequalityofproductsor efficiency in satisfying consumer needs but rather how innovative products are, howwell they are designed and howwell they solve a consumer problem in a creative manner. This becomes especially important as digital transformation cuts across industry boundaries (Hoppet al. 2018).Competitors arenotonly traditional companies inan industry,butalsodigital companieswhoareusing theirdigital resources toenter the newmarkets. For example, apps, such as GoogleMaps, are competing with tra- ditional navigation companies such asGarmin andTomTom,which ledGarmin to lose 70% of its market capitalization two years after the navigation apps were introduced (Downes andNunes 2013). Newdigital businesses are oneof the examples of thedigital transformation era. In line with this, the behavior of customers is also changing. They often become co-producers of the products through, for instance, crowdsourcing campaigns. Furthermore, their expectationshavechanged.Consumershave the intention tobuy andhaveaccess toproductsandservices inaneasier andmoreconvenientway than ever before.Theywant toorder products online and receive them thenext day; this is resulting in an increasing trend for electronic commerce. For example, 69% of Internet users in the European Union shopped online in 2018 (Eurostat 2018). Changes like this are creating the shift in the economy, and companies need to adjust to this or they often go bankrupt. And platforms, like Netflix, are trans- forming industries, driving big players such as Blockbuster to bankruptcy. Due to these changes in the economy, the workforce is also affected andmust adjust. Employers now require employees to have different skills than before. It seems no longer to be important howmuch employees know, but rather howwell they can apply their knowledge. In the digital era, skills that are essential are higher-order thinking and creative problem solving, as companies increasingly depend on the creation of newproducts, services, and processes in order to remain competitive. These skills rely on the fact that wemustfindmeaning or patterns in 166 E. Smailhodžić andD. Berberović