Classroom Companion: Business

 
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Answers
1. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Tencent, Tesla, Alibaba 
Group, TSMC, and Berkshire Hathaway. All of them are businesses in the 
digital economy except Tesla, TSMC, and Berkshire Hathaway.
2. About 50%.
3. No, many people in poor parts of the world do not have access to mobile tele-
phony.
4. The answer to this question depends on where you live. However, there are a 
few general observations such as access to the internet and mobile services, 
access to vast amounts of information, automation of industrial production, 
automated access to societal functions, and so on.
 
Chapter 1 · The Digital Economy

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References
Christensen, C. (1997). The innovators dilemma: When new technologies cause great firms to fail. 
Harvard Business School Press.
Data is giving rise to a new economy. (2017, May 6). The Economist.
Grossman, R. (2016, March 21). The industries that are being disrupted the most by digital. Harvard 
Business Review.
Hilbert, M., & López, P. (2011, April). The world’s technological capacity to store, communicate, and 
compute information. Science, 332.
ITU statistics, 2018.
Nambiar, M., & Poess, M. (2011). Transaction performance vs. Moore’s Law: A trend. In Performance 
evaluation, measurements and characterization of complex systems (TPCTC 2010) (Lecture Notes 
in Computer Science) (Vol. 6417). Springer.
Nordrum, A. (2016, August 18). Popular internet of things forecast of 50 billion devices by 2020 is 
outdated. IEEE Spectrum.
Reid, P. (2015, October 27). IFPI Digital Music Report 2015: Global digital revenues match physical 
for first time. The Music Network.
Schultz, J. (2019, August 6). How much data is created on the internet every day. Micro Focus Blog.
Tapscot, D., Ticoll, D., & Herman, D. (2006). Digital conglomerates: Setting the agenda for enterprise 
2.0. New Paradigm Learning Corporation.
Vincent, J. (2016, July 4). UN condemns Internet access disruption as human rights violation. The 
Verge.
Wikipedia. (2021) List of public corporations by market capitalization. (Wikipedia website visited 
April 12, 2021)
Further Reading
Brian Arthur, W. (2015). Complexity and the economy. Oxford University Press.
McAfee, A., & Brynjolfsson, E. (2017). Machine, platform, crowd. W. W. Norton & Company.
Shapiro, C., & Varian, H. R. (1999). Information rules: A strategic guide to network economy. Harvard 
Business School Press.
References

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 
Switzerland AG 2021
H. Øverby, J. A. Audestad, Introduction to Digital Economics, 
Classroom Companion: Business,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78237-5_2
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