The Context of Digital Entrepreneurship. New Technologies Between Evolution and Revolution

The world has changed a lot in the last few decades. Increasingly exhausted of its physical resources and assaulted by pollution beyond its endurance limit, the Earth is showing increasing signs of fatigue. At the same time, technology is moving from the third industrial revolution to the fourth industrial revolution. Already, digital technology has begun to invade our living environment. Correspondingly, entrepreneurship has also changed, embracing “on the fly” new digital technologies, as well as the big issues of e-commerce and the contemporary world. But do the new digital technologies really represent a genuine technological revolution for the economy or are they just a new stage in an automation that began at least two hundred years ago (when the steam engine and Jacquard’s loom became iconic)? But are the new digital technologies just a much-needed and very useful placebo to inspire enthusiasm in a world facing other great impasses, or do they represent a reality with huge economic potential and, correspondingly, an essentially determining factor in the development of revolutionary digital entrepreneurship? But do the new technologies, historically speaking, fit Kondratieff's law of economic super-cycles (called by Joseph Schumpeter “Kondratieff waves”) or are they just some kind of evolutionary economic process, of circumstance, specific to a particular historical moment and to a certain degree of world development? And, given the credibility with which the Sustainable Development Goals have been implemented by the UN, what will be the effects of digitisation and digital entrepreneurship on people and work? Drawing on scientific literature devoted on the one hand to digital entrepreneurship and on the other hand to the economic and cultural nature of digital technology, this study aims to provide theoretical answers to the above-mentioned economic philosophy questions, as well as to other questions related to the proposed topic.