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The swift advancement of digital technology has rendered the digital transformation of firms a crucial element propelling innovation and growth within the pharmaceutical industry. This study seeks to explore the influence of digital technology, digital strategy, digital leadership, and digital innovation on the digital transformation of Chinese pharmaceutical firms, along with a detailed analysis of digital innovation’s role in this process. The study background demonstrates that digital transformation substantially influences the operational efficiency and market competitiveness of pharmaceutical firms. This study proposes the following research questions: How do digital technology, digital strategy, and digital leadership affect the digital transformation of Chinese pharmaceutical firms? What role does digital innovation play in this process? Quantitative methods are employed to perform statistical analysis on the gathered data by developing structural equation models to validate research hypotheses. Research indicates that digital technology, digital strategy, and digital leadership significantly enhance the digital transformation of pharmaceutical firms, with digital innovation serving a mediating role. This study indicates that digital innovation is a crucial catalyst for the digital transformation of Chinese pharmaceutical firms. Firms must prioritize the use of digital technology, the development of digital strategies, and the enhancement of digital leadership to facilitate digital transformation. This study holds both theoretical and practical significance for advancing the digital transformation of Chinese pharmaceutical firms.

For the month of April 2021, APBN explores the contributions of Sony in the evolution of medicine in our Features section. The article contribution by Leonard Yap, Head of Medical Imaging Solutions, Professional Solutions Company (PSAP) at Sony Electronics Asia Pacific looks at how Sony's technological contributions are revolutionizing the future of medicine. In the Columns section, we discuss the boon and bane of digital technology in healthcare and safety concerns of its use. In the Spotlights, we share about a research done by SingHealth and NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine to determine the receptiveness towards tele-monitoring for the management of chronic health conditions.

For the month of May 2021, APBN discovers how the used of digital technology and innovative new methods can help treatment, prevention and management of diseases. In the Columns section, we have a contribution by Son Pham, Country Manager for GE Healthcare Vietnam and the CEO for GE Vietnam on how technology has helped healthcare systems in Vietnam during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the Spotlights section, read about a research study by the National Heart Centre Singapore (NHCS) and its international partners affirm the use of intravenous iron to help heart failure patients improve health outcomes.

External enablers (EEs) are exogenous, macro-environmental forces that influence the rate, extent and substance of entrepreneurial activity. A steadily increasing body of empirical research has sought to identify, describe and predict the aggregate impact of EEs, yet few studies have assessed whether EEs exert similar or dissimilar effects across societal groups, and none to date have sought to ascertain whether EEs function in a gender-neutral fashion. The issue is important to address because it is common for governments to implement policies designed to leverage or mitigate the influence of EEs. Absent knowledge regarding the differential effects of EEs, policies may be enacted with an aggregate intent, but which may routinely disadvantage female entrepreneurs. To address this concern, we investigate the impact of a prominent EE (internet access) on entrepreneurial activity, employing a longitudinal design, consisting of 61 countries from 2004 to 2013. Our results suggest that increased internet access is, in the aggregate, associated with heightened entrepreneurial activity, but the favorable effect for male entrepreneurs is markedly greater than that for female entrepreneurs. The findings reveal that gender-based disaggregation is critical in assessing the influence of EEs.

Internet use has been evolving rapidly with the onset of digital technologies. Among the various public, private and welfare industries, transportation and accommodation are the leading services sectors that shift their transaction methods through online platforms. This paper examines the various factors affecting internet transactions particularly on transportation and accommodation services across selected countries using fixed-effects regression model. The researchers used data for thirty countries in 2011 to 2017. Findings indicate that internet penetration rate, credit card transactions, GDP per capita, percentage of internet users in the population, trade openness, and secured internet servers significantly affect internet transactions on services.

Lockdowns, restrictions, and widespread hysteria during Covid-19 have led to major shock to business operations and severely impacted the economy and society. The resulting labour shortages, supply chain issues and collapse in offline shopping forced companies to take immediate decisions and devise new strategies to respond and recover with minimum damage. Coupled with a digital eco-system, the e-commerce technology and its value networks have played an important role in alleviating the damage caused by sudden disruptions, mitigate risks, maintain business continuity, and ensure that businesses can economically and socially sustain through the uncertainties. While e-commerce was increasingly being used by Asian consumers for convenience, low price and variety, its role has now become essential for survival in countries like India, China and Singapore during the lockdown.

Therefore, it is useful to understand the way the business processes were impacted, how the business decision-makers responded and the role of e-commerce technology and services in Asia during Covid-19. This chapter tries to throw light on the above aspects, understand how e-commerce was affected and how it has helped in crisis response and recovery for businesses and consumers. It will also look at whether and how advanced technology such as data analytics, intelligent systems, cloud and blockchain have played an important role in accelerating the reach and impact of e-commerce in Asia.

Implementing digital technologies has made organizations more collaborative. Knowledge-based collaborative activities management has become the main organizational model of work. Identifying the factors that influence organizational collaboration is crucial to organizational design and ensuring effective digital transformation. Currently, collaboration has not received enough attention. Enterprises lack an understanding of its importance. This chapter quantitatively studies collaborative activities and their influencing factors. The regression analysis results show that the invisible independent variable such as knowledge-based innovation has a greater effect on organizational collaboration. We further conduct predictive analysis for organizational collaboration, and the predictive analysis results help the two case study companies to clearly understand their current status of organizational collaboration and the level of their respective influencing factors.

With the rapid development of global digital transformation, digital transformation is a system engineering with many collaborative elements, high degree of complexity and great difficulty in overall planning. As a common language for collaborative dialogue between different systems and different elements, standardization is an indispensable soft foundation in digital transformation, and also an important starting point to realize its efficient, intensive and collaborative development. Digital government is the key basis and an important part of the digital transformation, which has received widespread attention from all countries in the world. Based on the analysis of relevant policies and measures in United Kingdom, Denmark, Australia, Singapore and other countries with good performance in digital government construction, combined with the situation of digital technology standardization, this paper puts forward suggestions on the construction of digital government standardization, so as to provide reference for shaping fair digital transformation and building government digital capability. This paper proposes a digital government construction standard system, the evaluation index system of standard application, and the BP neural network model of standard application evaluation is constructed, and the simulation test is carried out.

This chapter discusses the impacts of digital technologies on society and on the education sector, reviews e-learning and hybrid learning, looks at learning and training in the organization, highlights the recent development of artificial intelligence (especially ChatGPT) and its impact on education, and comments on the role of the government and teacher in the education in the digital era.

This is a report of an interactive workshop that was collaboratively designed and implemented by a researcher and a group of practitioners. To share theoretical insights and teaching practices concerning the use of an online interactive platform to support classroom dialogue in mathematics classrooms, this article presents the theoretical and research underpinnings of the workshop, the procedure and main activities, the observed outputs, and reflection and suggestions on designing and organising the hybrid format of workshops in this field.

SMEs play a very important role in the economic development of a country, contributing to almost 30% of the gross domestic product and 40% of total exports. They offer huge employment opportunities with minimal capital investments. There are several schemes providing financial assistance, skill development, infrastructure development, marketing assistance, and technological upgradation. Like any other sector, SMEs were badly affected by the mobility restrictions during the pandemic. E-commerce and digitization were key to the survival and growth of SMEs during and after the pandemic era. In the year 2020–2021, more than 60% of the SMEs sold their products through online channels. Technology played a pivotal role in helping SMEs combat competition from large enterprises. There are also challenges for technological upgradation and innovations for SMEs. The positive point for SMEs is that they are inspired and rooted deeply in culture. This helps in generating employment while working in unison with the environment. This chapter aims to discuss how SMEs are deeply rooted in the Indian cultural background, providing business opportunities and employment in the local regions. Being close to nature, they also tend to fulfill the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. Green innovations have played an important role in sustainable innovations in the SME sector. Further, the adoption of new technologies by SMEs has helped them enhance their overall efficiency.

Human sense-making is a useful construct through which to examine some of the processes intrinsic to the teaching and learning of mathematics. Unlike sense-making of conversation where meaning-making is prominent, sense-making in mathematics can be a complex process that may not make sense in terms of the natural world we know, and therefore, has an impact upon the choice of abstractions used in teaching. Mathematical curiosity proceeds with logic yet also works with insight in discovering new mathematical horizons. This paper focuses upon the broad scope of human sense-making in mathematics. It considers theoretical and pedagogical issues and raises questions with regards to the effective use of digital technology in teaching and proposes a research agenda.