Digital Divide as the Entrepreneurial Growth Engine in the Covid Era: A Review

Abstract

It has been customary for human beings to somehow attribute to nature an opportunity or a challenge that forced organizations and people to mend ways and processes to keep the business running or accelerating beyond the threshold. COVID is no exception. It threw up both challenges and opportunities to the business world and served as a strict teacher who leaves no stone unturned in implementing values and ethics across personal and organizational domains. India has always been a hotbed of activities, traditionally, in colonial times and late when the Digital wave happens to sweep one and all, irrespective of demographics and businesses. Undoubtedly, the Silicon Valley in the US hitherto was the understood leader in terms of technology utilization and innovating through various platforms to widen the already massive reach of the world over integrating the marketing and other functional strategies to rule the business world. However, then the ‘developing’ nations of Asia have started posing a stiff challenge to them – especially countries like China, India, Korea, and a few of South East Asia. West has always portrayed East with zone lag in terms of ‘materialistic’ development that portrays modern economy definitions; however, COVID made us understand the inside-out story on various fronts, including the digital landscape! The pandemic has forced economies the world over to redefine their priorities both economically and socially. Undoubtedly, we are a vast nation trying to move faster over the past decade in terms of developing and augmenting our ‘basics’ and penetration of digital technology has made things more accessible in terms of reach and speed. The behavioral dynamics associated with the mantra of ‘self-reliance’ bring in steep changes and newer paradigms of defining businesses and their successes. The entrepreneurial moods of the prominent young population are on the upswing, disruptions and innovations being the critical drivers catalyzed by what is famous as a ‘digital’ resource. This paper tries to highlight through a firsthand gaze-through available and emerging digital dynamics influencing ways of doing businesses and redefining customer satisfaction and how the digital divide, as we call it in India owing to infrastructure and usage variations, would redefine the market segments and serve the customers, mostly young, who are native to the uncertain world of experimentations.