Trends and challenges in digital business innovation.

This book aims to improve the understanding of trends and challenges in digital business innovation at the European as well as at the global level. It helps create a connection between business readers and academic research. The book summarizes what is hot—each year—in digital business, but with a focus on showing something new to professionals from an academic perspective. In this book, Vincenzo has put together several topics, clustering them in three Parts that could be seen as the steps of a roadmap. The book focuses first on the main digital systems’ trends (Part I), trying to examine technological issues such as Big Data, Cloud Computing, Mobile services, etc., from a managerial perspective, aiming to reach a wide spectrum of executives, including those without an IT background. These last two Chapters shift the perspective of Part I, introducing the reader to Part II, which analyses and discusses the managerial challenges of technological trends focusing on governance models, the transformation of work and collaboration as a consequence of the digitization of the work environment, and finally dealing with what may be considered the real challenge to digital business: how to manage, control, and exploit a company’s identity and brand in a competitive digital environment. Part II frames the managerial challenges so that they can complement the IT manager’s perspective, while providing a useful summary of the state of the art for other non-IT executives. Part III discusses how companies have carried out ‘‘innovation in practice’’, providing easy to read and structured forms on what were some of the more interesting experiences at a global level in 2013. It is a challenge for any scholar to identify the most popular digital business topics in any given year. Given this, summarizing the vast literature in information systems, digital marketing, and computer science and identifying the most cutting edge phenomena is an arduous task. I congratulate Vincenzo for this book and look forward to seeing it in print soon.