Introduction

“The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, and the new forms of industrial organisation that capitalist enterprise creates,” wrote Joseph A. Schumpeter (1942), highlighting innovation and creative destruction as the driving forces of capitalist development. The contemporary digital economy represents one of the most complete embodiments of this process. Digitalisation is not merely another stage of technological modernisation but rather a systemic transformation that redefines the foundations of economic growth, alters the logic of value creation, and reshapes the functioning of institutions and societies. Its distinctiveness lies in the fact that the core resources today are data, algorithms, knowledge, and network infrastructure—intangible factors of production that shape economic and social structures in ways fundamentally different from previous industrial revolutions.