As far back as the industrial revolution, significant development in technical innovation has succeeded in transforming numerous manual tasks and processes that had been in existence for decades where humans had reached the limits of physical capacity. Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers this same transformative potential for the augmentation and potential replacement of human tasks and activities within a wide range of industrial, intellectual and social applications. The pace of change for this new AI technological age is staggering, with new breakthroughs in algorithmic machine learning and autonomous decision-making, engendering new opportunities for continued innovation. The impact of AI could be significant, with industries ranging from: finance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, supply chain, logistics and utilities, all potentially disrupted by the onset of AI technologies. The study brings together the collective insight from a number of leading expert contributors to highlight the significant opportunities, realistic assessment of impact, challenges and potential research agenda posed by the rapid emergence of AI within a number of domains: business and management, government, public sector, and science and technology. This research offers significant and timely insight to AI technology and its impact on the future of industry and society in general, whilst recognising the societal and industrial influence on pace and direction of AI development.

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive concept for the role of culture in economic growth. Design/methodology/approach -The paper overviews the culture based development (CBD) concept and its precise definition of culture as an encompassing socio-economic factor. The outlined CBD mechanism of impact is expressed in a testable empirical model. Alternative approaches for operationalizing the CBD definition of cultural capital are suggested and a real data application on intra-regional level (for German Kreise) is presented. Findings -The findings illustrate the ability of the CBD model to capture the statistical significance of culture. Originality/value -The paper demonstrates the two innovative elements of the CBD approach to culture: first, measuring culture with a factor variable as a better alternative to the mono-dimensional variables inferred by the state of the art; and second, thus capturing the overall economic meaning of the cultural factor (not just one aspect of it) for local socio-economic development.

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Die Dis cus si on Pape rs die nen einer mög lichst schnel len Ver brei tung von neue ren For schungs arbei ten des ZEW. Die Bei trä ge lie gen in allei ni ger Ver ant wor tung der Auto ren und stel len nicht not wen di ger wei se die Mei nung des ZEW dar.Dis cus si on Papers are inten ded to make results of ZEW research prompt ly avai la ble to other eco no mists in order to encou ra ge dis cus si on and sug gesti ons for revi si ons. The aut hors are sole ly respon si ble for the con tents which do not neces sa ri ly repre sent the opi ni on of the ZEW.Download this ZEW Discussion Paper from our ftp server:ftp://ftp.zew.de/pub/zew-docs/dp/dp08135.pdf SummaryRichard Florida's thought-provoking concept of the Creative Class can be seen a fruitful contribution for our understanding of regional economic development because it stresses the importance of professional activities and the potential role of the cultural milieu for attracting knowledge carriers and innovative people to a location. However, previous attempts to corroborate the basic pillars of Florida's theory typically suffer from serious deficiencies. Since correlation does not imply a causal relationship and reverse causality might be an important issue in the context of regional development, modern empirical techniques are required to look deeper at the phenomena.The present paper aims at scrutinizing two basic hypotheses of Richard Florida's concept of the Creative Class. The first is that the regional concentration of the Creative Class entails better economic performance as measured by employment growth or an increasing wage bill. Moreover, the Creative Class concept should outperform "traditional" indicators of human capital such as the share of high-skilled workers in the regional labour force. Using a large micro data set for West Germany for the observation period 1975 to 2004 containing information on professional activities, we are able to collect panel data for 323 NUTS 3 regions. Indeed, our results indicate that Florida's classification scheme for creative people seems have remarkable explanatory power for regional economic performance. On the basis of dynamic panel estimation we find evidence for the Creative Class playing an important role in regional economic development. In addition, the concept of measuring regional innovative capabilities by counting high-skilled persons seems to be less adequate when it comes to identify the growth potential of a region. Therefore, our econometric investigation confirms the first part of Florida's story. The empirical findings, however, are at odds with the second part. According to Florida; the Creative Class has a taste for a liberal cultural milieu which is typically indicated by a regional concentration of Bohemians, whereas favourable economic conditions do not play a major role. For German data we cannot support this view. There is no evidence for the Creative Class following the Bohemians. By contrast, we find some support for the hypothesis that creative workers prefer living in economically ...

This article introduces cultural gravity as a concept that serves to better disentangle the direction and magnitude of the effects from migration, which is controversial in recent literature. The aim is to test for cultural gravity effects on both the geographic concentration and human capital productivity of immigrants in the EU15 countries. Operationally, we proceed to construct an empirical cultural gravity measure and test it with the use of a composite cross‐sectional database, comprising, inter alia, the World Value Survey and Eurostat Census data. After an initial exploration of relevant cultural data by means of multivariate statistical analysis, we present an extended formulation of a gravity model approached through logistic regression methods and a three‐stage least‐squares estimation. Our results clearly demonstrate the existence of a cultural gravity effect among immigrants. Finally, an interesting finding is that cultural gravity also plays a significant role in the context of the Culture‐Based Development (CBD) growth model.