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This work shows how we have designed and implemented a digital platform for Smart Villages, which can serve as a knowledge management and decision support system for rural stakeholders, including planners, administrative staff, and decision-makers. Our platform is intended to help pilot a smooth transition into a sustainable administration, help to boost rural services through digital innovation, and, in general, reduce the gap concerning the city’s world. Although the platform has arisen around a community belonging to the European Alpine Space, the lessons learned can be easily transferred to other scenarios in which determining and improving the degree of smartness maturity of the rural communities is a critical challenge that can facilitate undertaking public or private investments. Our goal is to provide the necessary tools for collaboration and sharing experiences and data collection and analysis to enable the best possible informed decision-making concerning the promotion of smarter villages.

An important but unexplored research issue is understanding how digital innovation ecosystem and a quintuple helix model can support the promotion of Circular Economy. Circular Economy, however, is intrinsically linked to the innovation issue. It can occur in a productive and consumption system under the form of a new product, process, organizational or marketing model. In the meantime, the digital innovation ecosystem debate was enriched by the social and environmental sustainability perspectives that are the pillars of the Circular Economy theory. Despite this, the research has failed to achieve full comprehension of digital innovation ecosystems’ dynamics and processes for the Circular Economy, by highlighting the need for deeper understanding. Under the above assumptions, this paper presents the evidence of a single and extreme case study related to the Italian Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform (ICESP). This is shown as good practice of a digital platform for stakeholders’ engagement, supporting the creation of a digital innovation ecosystem focused on the Circular Economy. We conclude by deriving implications for researchers and policy makers’ agendas.

Within wider debates on sustainability and digitalisation, frugal innovation (FI) scholars largely assume that digital technologies are important for FI in realising more sustainable outcomes. However, very few studies interrogate this causality. To tackle this challenge, we connect FI with digitalisation. Thereto, we conceptualise digital technologies as and within FIs and discuss three frugality dimensions to analyse three empirical case studies of digitally-enabled FIs. We use these cases to introduce new nuances on how digitalisation affects frugality and scaling. Our results unveil that digitalisation can increase frugality by enabling more accessible and affordable solutions through new flexible funding schemes and pay-as-you-go models. However, our evidence also implies decreasing frugality by an increase in end-user costs and digital exclusion. Likewise, increasing frugality through complexity reduction seems mainly to benefit intermediaries and frugal innovators themselves, whereas benefits of digitalisation in terms of complexity reduction for end-users seem to be limited. Digitalisation can even increase complexity for end-users, thus suggesting decreasing frugality. Finally, just like with non-digital innovations, scaling of digitally enabled innovations is dependent on the quality of logistical infrastructure and local adaptation practices. Moreover, scaling of digitally-enabled innovations is limited to users in regions with a proper ICT infrastructure.

This chapter discusses e-services by looking at E-government, E-learning, and E-health, reviews digital platforms & ecosystems, looks at social commerce & sharing economy, and highlights emerging trends of mobile business.

Open banking regulatory regimes represent an attempt by regulators to take advantage of a wave of digitalization and its associated sea of data to encourage more dynamic and efficient financial services sectors. This chapter explores Australia’s Consumer Data Right regime and how its planned expansion beyond financial services could propel fundamental changes to large sectors of Australia’s economy and society. We explore why these regimes are being put into place now and what these changes could look like, including potential consequences. Lastly, we provide recommendations on how regulators should build data sharing regulatory regimes. In order to best achieve the goals of encouraging data leveraged social economic development, financial inclusion, and furthering innovation through data sharing requirements, we make three recommendations. First, regulators must ensure the burdens and benefits of these regimes are consistent and fair, as it is very easy to replace one asymmetry with another. Second, consumers must be at the center: their benefits and safety are paramount to adoption and success of an economy that properly leverages consumer data. Third, open banking regimes must consider other technological developments, regulations, and trends to be incorporated as part of a larger national data strategy if they are to be effectively adopted.

We draw on the academic literature on university ecosystem, digital platforms, and professional identity development to conceptualise how we exploited digital platforms for entrepreneurship educators in an SSA university context. To illustrate, we present the Accelerating Entrepreneurship Support in Universities Accelerator Programme, the first pilot developed and applied at Riara University. The design of the programme, the delivery method, and the skills and competencies taught and developed by student entrepreneurs reveal the complexities of reinforcing an undergraduate programme in a Kenyan university and the tools needed to address the said complexities. Our reflections provide insights for mainstreaming entrepreneurship in SSA universities to ensure the development of professional identity within entrepreneurship programmes.