The purpose of this chapter is to introduce research on the impact-driven productivity and innovation gains achieved through the adoption of unified communication and collaboration (UC&C) technologies as drivers of digital transformation across a global automotive organization. Against the background of research on the bioeconomy and economic ecosystems, indicators of cultural change in the workplace and other transformation factors shown to have an impact included the ease of use and adoption, legacy reduction, and elimination, increased organizational efficiency and generating savings.
TopIntroduction
Although a press release by the United Nations Environment Program (2023) indicated that the “ozone layer is on track to recover within four decades”, the bioeconomy as a new approach emphasizing “reusing, recycling, and recovering materials” (Satya, et al., 2023, p. 1) is one of the essentials as part of the “strong and functional couplings among ecological, economic, social, and technological processes” explaining “the complexification of human-made systems, and phenomena”, such as the use of artificial intelligence for sustainable complex socio-technical-economic ecosystems (Martínez-García, 2022, p. 1). Such ecosystems are acutely threatened by serious degradation. This state of affairs not only leads to acute economic losses, but also entails catastrophic ecological, social, and cultural damage.
This is because after decades of intensely damaging use, in “recent years, the growing trend of energy consumption from fossil fuels in the world” had presented humankind with major crises related to environmental pollution, hydrological stress and “increasing acceleration in the depletion of energy resources” (Wang, et al., 2023, p. 1). In this scenario, some of the challenges related to biogas generation from biomass as a cleaner alternative towards a circular bioeconomy, which is considered to be a natural investment in citizen well-being and societal prosperity, can be solved using artificial intelligence.
The bioeconomy is one of the priorities of the European Commission (EC), and the topics of the bioeconomy and economic and social ecosystems have been included as related to emerging trends with regard to challenges in e.g., the proceedings of the international conference on Sustainable Research andInnovation (SRI) (Mwongera & Langat, 2014) and when building the hyperconnected society in terms of Internet of Things (IoT) research and innovation value chains, ecosystems and markets (Vermesan & Friess, 2015), as well as considered in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
This specific chapter will address especially SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, and to a lesser extent, SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production, as related to productivity.