Digitization, epistemic proximity, and the education system: Insights from a bibliometric analysis

Advances in IoT, AI, Cyber-Physical Systems, Computational Intelligence, and Big Data Analytics require organizations and workforce to be able and willing to learn how to interact with digital technology. In organizations, coordination and cooperation between actors with expertise in business and technology is fundamental, but integration is hard without understanding the terminology and problems of the interlocutor. Epistemic proximity becomes prominent, underlining the importance of an education focused on flexibility, willingness to cope with the unknown, and interdisciplinarity. The main goal of this work is to provide a perspective on how the education system is evolving to support organizations in the digitization era through a quantitative analysis of literature. More than 170,000 papers were selected from the Scopus database, matching a wide set of keywords related with innovation, problem solving, and organizational change. Patterns in the co-occurrence of keywords were studied. In addition, similarities and differences in the distribution of relevant themes across disciplinary areas, as well as their evolution since 2000, were analyzed. Academic interest is found to be generally increasing over the years in all disciplines, although considerable fluctuations can be observed. This variation is found to be nonuniform in the macroareas.