Dinesh C. Sharma is a New Delhi-based award-winning journalist and author with over thirty-five years’ of professional experience. He has written extensively on science and technology, climate change, health, environment and innovation for national and international media, including The Lancet and Wired. He has been Science Editor at Mail Today, and Managing Editor at India Science Wire and is currently the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow (2020-2021). His book The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution was awarded the Computer History Museum Book Prize in 2016. He has also been a visiting faculty at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Ateneo de Manila University, Manila. Dinesh Sharma tweets at @dineshcsharma

This report examines digitalisation’s effects on science, technology and innovation and the associated consequences for policy. In varied and far-reaching ways, digital technologies are changing how scientists work, collaborate and publish.

Measuring the Digital Transformation: A Roadmap for the Future provides new insights into the state of the digital transformation by mapping indicators across a range of areas – from education and innovation, to trade and economic and social outcomes – against current digital policy issues, as presented in Going Digital: Shaping Policies, Improving Lives.

Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) are the key drivers of the economy and development of a country. The economic and social impacts of STI require a deep understanding of the STI ecosystem, which includes the interactions between actors, their technologies, and their business models. This book, "Science, Technology, and Innovation Ecosystems: A National and Global Perspective," focuses on the STI ecosystem of India in comparison to other innovation-backed global countries. It will include a study of the entire STI ecosystem, focusing on the system interconnectedness required for strengthening it. The building of interconnection within actors of the STI ecosystem is one of the paramount requirements to reinvigorate the STI ecosystem as a whole. The book will also present the crucial role of STI in bringing socio-economic development from a national and international perspective. It addresses the development of viable solutions for a sustainable future and a positive societal transformation with the help of innovative science-based approaches. This book showcases the future of science in terms of emerging frontier and strategic technologies, giving us a snapshot of future STI efforts worldwide. Emphasis is given to the policy directives and program interventions backed by evidence to revamp the STI system by addressing the societal and economic needs of the country. The book will strategically bring the concept of the relevance of the Intellectual Property (IP) ecosystem in building the country’s innovation capacity along with specific pieces of evidence on how the IP system should be roped in to bring higher innovation efficiency. An insight is provided to chart out the pathway for creating a knowledge-based economy focusing on knowledge production to knowledge consumption through knowledge diffusion.

This book examines the nature, extent and implications of rapid strides digitalization has made in India since the turn of the millennium. These have been examined not merely in the sphere of information and communication technology (ICT) but its multifarious applications spreading across almost all aspects of production, services and institutions which have profound repercussions for the transformation of the society and economy at the micro, meso and macro levels. With contributions from both ICT scholars and social scientists, this book presents diverse scenarios and unravels challenges faced in the process of technical applications, access by the users of these disruptive technologies (automation, e-commerce, big data analytics & algorithms, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, etc.) which, unlike heavy machines (embodied technology), mostly defy physical space, pace of mobility and inoperability between technologies. Chapters in this volume address challenges and possibilities in establishing and operating intricate engineering infrastructure, technical and societal constraints encountered in broad-basing digitalization across layers of educational and social skills conducive to difficult geographies. Issues dealt within this book include farming, healthcare, education, food processing, e-commerce, labour, rural community development, open source data and information democracy. The chapters also reflect upon implications on local economy and society, of the very global nature of these seamless technologies where inter-operability remains the quintessential advantage of digitalization whether promoted or spearheaded through the state, private sector or global capital. The book critiques policy inadequacies and suggests plausible policy approaches to reduce the adverse impacts of fast digitalization and broad-base potential benefits across space and levels of socio-economic development of regions and society. This book would be of interest to scholars, practitioners, technocrats, industry analysts, policy makers and civil society agencies.