Abstract
Peace should be a goal that communities aim at achieving to enhance the wealth and prosperity of society. Peace is a source for companies, governments, and cities creating value by technology within social and business ecosystems relying on dialogue and cooperation. The aim of the chapter is to elucidate how technology helps to identify a path to promote sustainable peace driving communities to create value within digital, social, and business ecosystems. Technology helps to sustain peace-building and drive communities towards sustainable peace as a source for growth and development.
TopIntroduction
Technology should help drive people and groups to have more opportunities to actively participate and exert influence on processes that affect the society (Kahl and Larrauri, 2013). Technology helps support the processes of globalization to shape a society oriented to construct, maintain and promote peace as a condition for creating value and sustaining wealth for individuals, groups, organizations and communities living within society. Processes of market and financial globalization have offered global companies many opportunities for business and for creating economic value everywhere. Globalization has the potential to create a world of peace for spreading knowledge and innovation, and encouraging people to rediscover the importance and relevance of cooperation refusing and abandoning any chance of conflicts among groups, communities and nations (Weede, 2004; Marquardt, 2005; Schneider, 2014).
Technology is opening new opportunities for driving post-industrial, brain, service and knowledge-based economies to provide conditions for economic, social and public value creation. Digital economy helps to identify new business models and enhance wealth creating platforms for exchange of data, information and knowledge involving more actors to co-create value within society and offering opportunities for preventing and/or avoiding conflicts among people. Peace tends to emerge as a source leading to processes of value creation that involve companies, governments and cities going digital to design and implement social and business ecosystems that contribute to rediscovering the community as social and human entity able to construct value living in peace and allow to identify the best solutions about how to enrich the possibilities for sustainable value co-creation.
Promoting peace implies not only to support peace-building initiatives but also enable communities to identify a path for strengthening sustainable peace (UN, 1992; UN 2000; UN, 2016; Coleman, 2012). Today, within global and knowledge-based, interconnected and digital economies and within open, plural, democratic, diversity-oriented and multi-cultural societies communities should create sustainable value by rediscovering the opportunities of a sustainable peace «as existing in a state where the probability of using destructive conflict, oppression and violence to solve problems is so low that it does not enter into any party’s strategy, while the probability of using cooperation, dialogue and collaborative problem-solving to promote social justice and well-being is so high that it governs social organization and life» (Coleman, 2012, p. 4). The aim of the chapter is to elucidate how information technology helps to identify a path to promote sustainable peace that drives communities to create value within digital, social and business ecosystems. As communities seeking sustainable peace, people, organizations and business tend to rediscover the meaning of community and the importance to stay together and live in peace identifying new ways to drive and orient sustainable, social and economic growth and development. Peace should be considered both as a permanent status and goal that people, organizations and communities should aspire to achieve and maintain as natural condition to create sustainable, social, economic and public value within society.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Peace: It is freedom and implies that the means and ends of peace and development practices should be to ensure the equitable distribution of economic opportunities, political freedoms, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, protective security, and freedom from direct violence.
Peace-Building: It refers to a long-term process concerning the activities aimed to reduce the risk of lapsing or relapsing into conflict, to prevent violent outbreaks of conflict, or to sustainably transform armed conflicts into constructive peaceful ways of managing conflict and provide the foundations for living in sustainable peace and development.
Digital Business Ecosystem: It helps to support digital business models and local and regional development and growth encouraging cooperation between small organizations, entrepreneurs, local government, public administration, research, and innovation centers to promote the cohesion of local communities and enable new modes of sustainable e-business practices and open innovation.
Globalization: It means that the varieties of consumers, organizational structures, products, and technologies converge in the same time because transport and technological communication networks tend to increasingly reduce physical barriers and distances and favor social and economic exchanges and relationships between individuals and groups, among organizations and companies, between communities sustaining a global culture in the society.
Business Ecosystem: It refers to intentional communities of economic actors whose individual business activities share in some large measure the fate of the whole community.
Digital Economy: It refers to the pervasive use of information technology (hardware, software, applications, and telecommunications) in all aspects of the economy, including internal operations of organizations (business, government, and non-profit), transactions between organizations, and transactions between individuals, acting both as consumers and citizens.
Value Co-Creation: It converts the market into a forum where dialogue among the consumer, the firm, consumer, communities, and networks of firms can take place.
ICT4Peace: It encompasses the varying types of activity that are carried out in relation to armed conflict, including conflict prevention and management, peace operations, humanitarian relief and disaster assistance, and post-conflict peace building and reconstruction.
Sustainable Peace: It is existing in a state where the probability of using destructive conflict, oppression, and violence to solve problems is so low that it does not enter into any party’s strategy, while the probability of using cooperation, dialogue, and collaborative problem solving to promote social justice and wellbeing is so high that it governs social organization and life.