Digital World

1 Innovation challenges in the digital economy

Damian Radcliffe

 

Introduction

The digital revolution, promised for so long, is now finally upon us. Much of this digital change has happened at such a dazzling pace, especially over the past decade, that many governments, regulators and traditional media businesses are struggling to keep up. This is not surprising when you consider that the media has changed faster over the past decade than at any other time in history (Ofcom 2011: 27–36).

At the beginning of the last decade the launch of a new communications service was the beginning of a relatively slow adoption curve… mobile phones and multichannel television both took more than a decade to reach 50% penetration. From 2000 to 2010, when services ...