Dr Leith Campbell is Managing Editor of the Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy, a role he inherited at the end of 2020, after serving as Production Editor and Deputy Managing Editor for several years. He is an international consultant on telecommunications regulation. His main career has been in telecommunications R&D, having worked for Bell Labs and Bellcore in the US and Telstra Research Laboratories in Australia. He has been in and out of academia, having held research and teaching positions at the Universities of Cambridge and Durham in the UK, and having led an industry university research consortium in Australia. He is currently an Adjunct Professor in the School of Engineering at RMIT University in Australia. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Adelaide, Australia.

The concept of the digital economy has been around since the 1990s and its ever-expanding reach is leading to more and more activities being conducted online. This, in turn, is leading to an expansion of the digital society with its attendant benefits and issues. The Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy (JTDE), for example, is seeing more papers evaluating the acceptance of, or resistance to, the introduction of new online services. It is important, therefore, as ICDEc is doing, to promote research and discussion on the digital economy and the digital society.

This talk is based on a new initiative by ICDEc and the JTDE to encourage expanded research papers on a wide range of aspects of the digital economy. It will describe in broad terms the topics that have been accepted for publication and provide some indications of what has not been accepted. It will attempt to draw some lessons on what is important for future studies of the digital economy and where gaps may exist in research interests.