Systems of change: a study on the nature of ICT and AI and their impact on industrial trajectories

The dissertation emphasises the role of technological side of ICTs in establishing industrial links both within and beyond ICT cluster or system. The overarching aim of the dissertation is to bring technological and systemic aspects into economic mechanisms driving the process of digitalisation in different industries. The dissertation consists of four chapters and has a funnel-like structure; it starts with the study on macro productivity dynamics indicated with intersectoral labor mobility moving away from industries with depleted techno-economic opportunities. The dissertation continues with the research on two technology systems - ICT and AI - as sources of new technological opportunities and economic activities setting in motion the dynamics described before. It is important to estimate the magnitude and structure of the ICT's "grip" over the countries' economies and rationalise AI's nature to construct better predictions with regard to their impact on established technological trajectories, productivity, employment and long-term growth. Thus, the concluding study is an example of envisaging potential futures for the semiconductor industry whose technological trajectory is disrupted by the emergence of AI. The employed methods include analytical modeling, text analysis, decomposition exercise, productivity analysis, network analysis, and metrics of economic complexity such as relatedness. The author worked with various sources of secondary data such as PATSTAT, REGPAT, COR&DIP, STAN OECD, as well as with primary data collected through webscraping and text mining