ICT and Innovation: Editorial

摘要

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and innovation are closely interlinked. New technologies can help economies, industries and firms grow and succeed, and the large number of government initiatives to foster the spread of ICT is testament to the expectation that ICT has a broad societal impact that may even go beyond the economic effects. The collection of papers in this Special Issue on ICY and Innovation aims to give an insight into the state-of-the-art of research on ICT and its impact on innovation, broadly defined. The selected papers - some of them presented at the 2nd Scientific Seminar on "Communications & Media Markets: Emerging Trends and Policy Issues" held at the Florence School of Regulation - European University Institute (Florence, May, 2012) - give a broad overview of the potential effects, both in terms of the information and communication technologies under consideration - from ICT in general over mobile telephony and broadband infrastructure to specific technologies like social enterprise software - and the outcome variables, which include macroeconomic indicators, infrastructure deployment and firm-level performance.