3FOOD

Third Industrial Revolution Consulting Group
resources to build resiliency into every part of the communication and Big Data network that is
emerging.
The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s was a misestimate of the timing, not the magnitude, of
the digital revolution. Today, digital technology is replacing labor in increasingly complex tasks.
This process of labor substitution and disintermediation has been underway for some time in
service sectors – think of online banking, enterprise resource planning, procurement or
customer relationship management. And it is spreading to the production of goods, where
robots, cyberphysical systems, new sensor technology and 3D printing are displacing labor.
Luxembourg and the EU are part of this global digital transition towards a world in which the
most powerful global flows will be ideas, e-services and digital capital, not goods, traditional
services, and traditional capital. The rapidly growing digital component of global flows
exemplifies this trend 285 :
The transition into a seamless emerging Digital Era will favor regions that build the
infrastructure, institutions, skills and business environments that their innovators, companies
and citizens need to participate fully.
Adapting to this digital transition will require shifts in mindsets, policies, investments (especially
in human capital), and increasingly also models of employment and distribution. For an agile,
wealthy and advanced economy such as Luxembourg, this creates new openings to carve out
285 Global flows in a digital age: How trade, finance, people, and data connect the world economy, McKinsey Global
Institute Report, April 2014.
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