Acceleration of the digital transformation of the economy
The digital transformation of the global economy has hardly been slow in the past 20 years. The first mobile phone arrived in
1989. The world wide web is 30 years old and has been broadly accessible for the past 25, while the mobile internet, just 15
years of age, is approaching full global penetration. E-commerce has rapidly expanded, and digital payments platforms leading to
a broader set of digitally-enabled financial services have seen double digit growth, especially in China.
Looking at technological enablement across sectors and regions, the gating factor with respect to growth typically is not just
the state of the technology itself, but rather the speed with which individuals, organizations, and complex systems are willing
or able to change. This resistance to change is sometimes referred to as inertia, by analogy with the physics we all learned in
high school, where to put a body with some mass in motion or to change its speed or direction requires the application of
some force.