Preface: Humans in Digital Marketplaces

Abstract

Considering the history of mankind, not much time has passed, since Friedrich Schiller captured the dilemma of his time in a nutshell in his famous Wallenstein trilogy: “The world is narrow, wide the mind of man”. Today, in our digitalized and globalized world, Friedrich Schiller would describe the dilemma precisely in the opposite way: The world has become wide, but our brains are too narrow for the new world we live in.

The articles in this book underline the wide range of opportunities for innovative business enterprises offered by digital technology in our global and connected world. There is no doubt that this rapid development will not only continue, but even accelerate during the next years. The most important perspectives and directions of this process are clearly pointed out in this book.

Technological innovations do not only alter our previous means of production or change economic developments, they also offer completely new instruments to academic research. The use of digital media allows previously inconceivable insights into the structure and the organization of complex phenomena. This does not only concern classical natural sciences, such as astrophysics, but also and above all the so‐called life sciences, the research of living systems from cellular and organic systems to the ecological and social systems.