Digitalization, expectations, and industrial dynamism: a conceptual map

Resumo

This paper proposes a conceptual, theoretical and analytical map, aiming to help understand the contemporary process of digitization of industrial companies in developing economies. It examines the relevance of the Schumpeterian hypothesis that technical progress in the digital age can drive a 4th long cycle of industrial dynamism or the 4th Industrial Revolution. It also highlights the complementarity of this hypothesis with the Keynesian view of the business calculation of the rate of return on investment in innovation, under uncertainty, changing expectations and conventions, pointing out the key role of the entrepreneurial drive (animal spirits) in capitalist development. The paper also analyzes the growing challenges that the digital age poses to developing countries, based on the structuralist and institutionalist views of Furtado and Abramovitz, respectively. Finally, it warns of the risk of deepening heterogeneities, inequalities and, at the limit, exclusion of such countries and their enterprises from the 4th IR.