Inventory of digital tools and their potential socio-economic impacts

Living labs are groups of people. They are selected on the basis of a motivation to work on a specific problem, called ‘focal question’, the object of the analysis. After this, people who are involved in this problem are contacted: farmers or farmers advisors, technicians and technology developers. The methodology is: interviews, workshops, gathering of further data for validation on the context. A SWOT analysis is conducted on the specific problem, and potential future scenarios (one realistic and one pessimistic) are developed for conducting scenario workshops.

A Socio-Cyber-Physical System can be understood as follows: 

1. A system is a set of entities with relations and interactions between them. These interactions can create new entities. The entities and the boundaries of a system are defined by the observer in relation to his/her purposes. Hence a description of a system is a representation of reality according to a specific observer.
2. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are next-generation engineered systems that integrate embedded computing technology (cyber part) into the physical phenomena by using transformative research approaches that account for the complexity and multi-disciplinarity of such systems.
3. A socio-technical system consists of social entities and technical entities that interact with each other and have equal importance in the understanding of socio-technical systems. Social actors all have various needs, wants, skills, knowledge. Technical entities are non-human entities, including technologies as well as processes surrounding those technologies.
4. A SCPS consist of three domains (socio, cyber and physical) all of equal importance and with the ability to influence other domains. Each domain has a broad range of different entities governed by a set of rules, but also between domains hybrid rules determine the relations and interactions of the entities within the domains.

In DESIRA, application scenarios have been built by grouping digital tools according to the function they serve. For instance, the scenario livestock in agriculture groups all digital tools that can be used to support animal husbandry activities, which differ from those that can be used for machinery for instance. A non-exhaustive but well developed list of the application scenarios derived from an online survey is offered. Three domains are covered: agriculture (e.g. food, crops, livestock, management), forestry (e.g. wood, wildfires, CO2, machinery, timber) and rural areas (e.g. mobility, healthcare, demography, education, government, infrastructure). An example of digital tool pertaining to the agricultural domain is a ‘software for irrigation management needs mapping and automatic fertilisation according to requirements (precision techniques)’ used for crop fertilisation. An example from the forestry domain is a ‘systems to support operations preventing wildfires’ used for prevention purposes or ‘estimation of the amount of carbon absorbed by the plant’ used for CO2. An example from the rural areas domain is a ‘platform for buying houses and starting businesses in depopulated rural areas’ used for demography purposes.

DGCs in DESIRA are defined as “digital technologies that deeply reconfigure routines, rules, actors, and artefacts of social and economic life”. They have the potential to change the rules of a game, and identifying the latter (in DESIRA, the socio-cyber-physical system) helps to understand the positive and negative disruption they may cause. Practically speaking, some key characteristics of a digital game changer can be identified: it is based on the use of digital technologies and has the potential to become widespread because of low cost or because it comes for free. Software-only solutions typically spread faster than those also involving hardware because the digital world operates at faster speeds than the physical one: that is why Facebook or Twitter took very little to enter our lives, or why solutions for online working are becoming increasingly popular. Four fundamental questions need answering: is the new technology meeting a need (in a specific field)? Is it easy to use? Is it affordable? Is the right set of technologies in place? Has the technology the potential to highly impact current processes? Answering yes to all those questions is a good hint to identify potential digital game changers. Identified potential game changers in the context of DESIRA are: social media, cloud, local and remote sensing, distributed ledgers, data and analytics, augmented reality, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, connectivity.

In the context of the DESIRA project, socio-economic impact is defined as: the opportunities and threats of digitisation which has ‘deep repercussions on people’s lives, and generates losers (who are marginalised by the changes) and opponents (who resists and create alternative rules of the game) as well as winners (who benefit from the change)’.

Refers to the macro-dimensions involved in the digitalisation process as emerging from the literature review: economic, environment, governance, social. In the literature, the governance domain is considered part of the social domain. Instead in the proposed DESIRA mapping, it represents a domain to emphasise its policy and administrative macro-dimensions.

Sub-dimensions or specific areas within each domain emerging from the literature review. Although not exhaustive, it identifies several areas of interest to provide a detailed impact map (e.g. areas of impact for the environment domain include animal wellbeing, ecosystem services, natural resources and risk management).

For each area of impact, the main outcomes of digital technologies have been identified and selected. For example, in the economic domain, digitalisation has an impact on companies (organisations) determining a higher decision-making autonomy in the production process as an outcome. In the environmental domain, the area of impact related to ecosystem services has the capability of reducing pollution emissions, thus having an impact on climate.