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The emergence of digital technologies has significantly reduced the economic costs of data—search, storage, computation, transmission—and enabled new economic activities. Over the years, firms able to create a platform-based ecosystem have become a force of “creative construction.” Economic activities (C2C, B2C, B2B) have been reorganized around platform-based ecosystems for value creation and value appropriation, which are orchestrated by multisided platforms via the “digital hand.” To further understanding of the Digital Platform Economy, this paper provides a conceptual framework consisting of three interrelated concepts: digital technology infrastructure, multisided digital platforms, and platform-based ecosystems (users and entrepreneurs). Using a unique database over five decades, we revisit the hypothesis that new firms were needed to introduce digital technologies. Some years, like some poets and politicians, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot and 1971 was clearly such a year. One of the events of 1971 was the inventions of the microprocessor, a computer on a chip. This invention led to the creation of the personal computer, the internet, the smart phone, and cloud computing. Over the past 50 years, economic activities have been reorganized from large bureaucratic firms to a more networked form of organization for creating value for consumers and making money for companies. To further our understanding of this digital revolution, we provide a framework consisting of three interrelated concepts: digital technology infrastructure, multi-sided digital platforms, and platform-based ecosystems. Using a unique database over five decades, we test the hypothesis that new firms were needed to introduce digital technologies. Countries that did not promote new firms fell behind in adopting the new technologies.

This paper presents a regional application of the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI) methodology of Acs et al. (2013) to examine the level of entrepreneurship across Hungary’s seven NUTS-2 level regions between 2006 and 2012. The Regional Entrepreneurship and Development Index (REDI) has been constructed for capturing the individual efforts, and their contextual features, of entrepreneurship across regions. The REDI method builds on a Systems of Entrepreneurship Theory and provides a way to profile Regional Systems of Entrepreneurship. Important aspects of the REDI method include the Penalty for Bottleneck analysis, which helps in identifying constraining factors in Regional Systems of Entrepreneurship, and Policy Portfolio Optimisation analysis, which helps policymakers consider trade-offs between alternative policy scenarios and associated allocations of policy resources. The paper describes the entrepreneurial disparities amongst Hungarian regions and provides public policy suggestions to improve the level of entrepreneurship and to optimise resource allocation over the 14 pillars of entrepreneurship in the seven Hungarian regions.