Economic growth often brings issues that run counter to the sustainability of society. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has led to accelerated popularization of digital platforms. From the perspective of early-stage investment, startup growth and innovative R&D, the power of realizing value with digital platforms is obvious. Driven by the operation of data-driven artificial intelligence, enterprises have the opportunity to act as leaders of social sustainability and global value network collaboration. Taiwan should formulate a national strategy based on digital operating capabilities, as well as becoming a core partner of the global ecosystem.

The world is currently making tremendous efforts to manage the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. It has shown the phenomenon of instability and disconnection inside of the ecosystem, and has also brought business operations such as production, service, and distribution into a new age. In recent years, the popularization of cloud solutions has promoted digital platforms as the key component of business operations. Collaborative demand to perform social sustainability can be fulfilled by digital platforms which have already evolved for the new era of value-based networks. 

Regarding the perspective of early-stage startup investment, increased focus on health, ageing and climate change have led to another wave of innovations during the outbreak. This year, there have been more startups joining unicorn clubs with a market value of more than $1 billion, 70% of which are platform business innovations. Based on the latest trends of Taiwan’s investment scene in the information and communications sector, such as martech solutions, block-chain platforms, sharing economy platforms, IOT solutions, data-modeling/machine-learning management platforms, all of them have demonstrated the growth potential of digital platform/solution innovations.

In terms of global industry development, every enterprise is actively investing in the implementation of digital platforms to accelerate the progress into new-type businesses. Top companies by market capitalization are now platform businesses. Amazon had the power to acquire Whole Foods to penetrate retail, Disney launched Disney Plus successfully as a streaming platform, and metaverse startup Roblox’s market capitalization has surpassed Electronic Arts and Ubisoft. All of these represent the rapid evolution towards new business models created by digital platforms to orchestrate interactions powered by data and artificial intelligence. As for the strategies to achieve competitive advantages of digital platform operations, the efforts invested in traffic generation will shift to site conversion and customer retention, and the lock-in effect to raise customer loyalty is the next focus to develop core competency on top of the value network. It will help each enterprise seamlessly evolve to drive organic growth.

While digital platforms demonstrate the power to facilitate exponential growth, it is critical to deliver value through performance-based innovation by domain-drive architecture of digital platforms. Healthcare is turning to outcome-based innovation; for example, the recently launched standardized autism spectrum disorder standard set (ASDSS) marks the acceleration of healthcare outcomes measurement by promoting data quality and availability. The EU’s research and innovation funding program Horizon Europe (FP9) for the period 2021-2027 is leading to mission-oriented research and innovation approaches. They all demonstrate a variety of value-based actions to meet the goals of a sustainable society.

While boasting of the rapid growth economy, we must stay focused on sustainability and digital platforms’ highly potential ability to achieve both business model innovations and cultural inclusion. Driven by the increasing speed to implement global value networks, each enterprise acting as the service front-end would request artificial intelligence incorporating data modeling to deliver value in real time. The objective of creating compelling customer experience at the right moment is currently the major focus of business innovation. It is important not to focus on the debate about how artificial intelligence will surpass the capability of human beings, but lies in the effort to deliver each individual the best support for self-motivated decisions in a timely manner. It definitely shows that we will need to leverage data-driven capabilities to better assist intelligent digital operations. Building seamless operations over digital platforms is indeed the foundation to create advantages for effective business innovation.

Digital platforms have become the basic infrastructure implemented in every enterprise in the new era. We will thus need to actively accumulate experience in business operation of the digital platform to directly navigate this shift and achieve social sustainability. The Board of Science and Technology, Executive Yuan has officially launched the Cloud-generation Digital Transformation Program in 2021 to greatly accelerate the implementation of cloud solutions so as to accelerate business development in various sectors. However, Taiwan's overall industrial advancement still comes with a few obstacles due to overemphasizing the differences including customized integration, functional development and cost-effective efforts. We need to aggressively transform the ideas and actions into performance-based planning and value-oriented operations to facilitate the next transition.

In order to implement this leapfrog strategy to lead the transition, we need to comprehensively think about a national policy to escalate the deployment of platform architecture with capabilities of information security, data modeling and artificial intelligence, and concretely introduce value-based indicators to achieve social sustainability. It will effectively inspire local enterprises to build business competency as well as quickly participate in the value network of the global ecosystem. At the same time, we need to actively cultivate interdisciplinary talents, empowered by the long-term trust advantages built by industry in Taiwan. It will help us to act as highly qualified partners in the global value network with the collaborative platform capabilities, and significantly enable us to fulfill mission critical innovations towards the transformation of a sustainable society.