– extracted and adapted from RAKAN Sarawak April-June 2020 –
The digital revolution can have a dramatic impact on society less prepared to adapt or already in a disadvantaged position.
The digital revolution makes the competitive landscape more complex.
Our life is becoming a combination of physical, technical, and biological facet.
Prospect and threats of the digital revolution arise not incremental gains but from the disruptions that can emerge from the new technology.
Digital era services and products have wide impact.
The inclination is for digital disruption to increase gap, unless we and government take decisive action to work on models of greater inclusiveness
These disruptions make present market leaders and economic value chains outdated, leading to lessened economic productivity and job losses, and, overtime, to economic and social decline.
Conversely, through innovative disruption, newcomers can become the new leaders.
However, disruptive innovation needs new ways of working, new culture, new tools, new economics, new everything.
Overall, digital innovation changes the basic nature of organisations using disruptive information technology-oriented digital technologies that allow new business models, method, services, and goods.
Digital Disruption needs decisive responses. The most important levels of decision making and action is at country and regional levels. It calls on government leaders and a wide range of collaborator in business, academia, citizens, and media to act decisively, practical, and skilfully.
Besides building a citizen focus government, leaders should use e-Government as an anchor to speed up the digital transformation across society. This also involving business in carrying out e-Government, for higher effectiveness and to strengthen the economic fabric and offer prospect to start-ups, through smart procurement.
Government regulation can unlock or block the societal drive towards digital modernisation. This lever does not cost money and often neglected.
The government should concentrate on creating the right conditions for success by these players, through regulation, incentives, taxes, policies, legislation, and funding.
Government support must be selective and focused on high economic effect and high long-term social impact entrepreneurship, for example social entrepreneurship, not wasting assets on unfair entrepreneurship.
Because the Fourth Industrial Revolution runs on knowledge, government leaders need to promote a concurrent revolution in training and education.
This demands a national plan for digital skills. Such a plan needs to address both the new skills necessary and the impact of the new digital technologies on jobs.
STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), one of the new skills set needs to be tackle.
It must assimilate at high school and universities, to power the digital capacity of the economy as an interim measure.
All student should have easy digital access. All student should have laptop or other methods that suitable.
Our teaching method should adapt new ways, whereby the teacher is no longer the centre of the classroom, but the facilitator to a wide range of knowledge accessible through the internet.
And may be the most important feature in addressing the new digital skills is inculcating basic digital literacy for the population at large to reduce the digital divide.
Equal access to the internet is a necessary basic levelling field that can open new opportunities for the poor and for those previously excluded by providing cheaper and faster information and knowledge to all.
Since ecosystems take time to form, it is important to promote linkages to the most advanced ecosystems in the world, rather than close-up local ecosystems. This will attract foreign talent and capital, and helping local entrepreneurs go global.
