Towards a Digital Renaissance
Posted 19 Oct 2022
The evolution of creativity, values and business from cyberspace to the metaverse
Are unicorns actually really dangerous?
Do investors and founders want the same things?
How does the speed of technological change alter the way we do business?
What is the future of the internet and Web 3.0?
Towards a Digital Renaissance, a new book by Jeremy Silver, CEO of Digital Catapult and entrepreneur, examines the interplay between technology, entrepreneurship and investment (both public and private). It looks at how different businesses and entrepreneurs have responded to the joint challenges of technology, fund-raising and business development.
This is a book about digital disruption explored from different points of view:
- The industry perspectives: how the music industry took the hit first, twenty years ago, and how it felt to be in the middle of the tsunami of rapid digital change we see replicated at even larger scale today.
- The disrupters’ perspective: four companies that thought they would be sprinters but discovered they needed to be marathon runners and how relationships between entrepreneurs and investors changed.
- The national perspective: how national policy-based interventions work, what the landscape of innovation looks like, what works well and where there are shortcomings.
The book also explores how Digital Catapult – a unique institution that some have suggested looks a little like the MIT Media Lab of the 1990s, uses public funds to address the challenges and opportunities of digital disruption.
Towards a Digital Renaissance argues for the Web’s potential to transition from a old digital ‘medieval’ world closed and walled up like mediaeval city states (explored by Jeremy Silver in his first book Digital Medieval), to a possible ‘digital renaissance’ based on the power of Web 3.0, open and interoperable systems and technologies.
These technologies will drive new business models, new ways of working and more opportunities. The change is happening right now, if we get this right, Silver suggests, then maybe we can achieve a digital renaissance, instead of the dystopian future so frequently forecast.
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For the past decade, the hype surrounding VR and AR technology has waxed and waned, but Jeremy Silver has been constant, a force of nature in this space. Some people just talk about technology, but Jeremy is in the trenches, and deeply understands everything ranging from how to fund a start-up to how to troubleshoot hardware. This book brilliantly tells a story about the metaverse growing up, and how Jeremy helped along the way. Jeremy Bailenson
Founding Director at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab
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