Information infrastructure constructing has become one of the main driving forces for the development of ICT as well as other important industries in advanced and catching-up economies. When the Digital Economy becomes the chance for capturing world market influence, it is appealing to study on how the digital landscape and infrastructure would be constructed and would yield for the wealth of nations. Some possible integrated set of policies and strategies that could help create a sustainable digital cluster in APEC economies may be implies.
For the development of a digital society, the use and development of information and communication technology invokes investments on the information superhighway. Major functions of the information superhighway include:
1. Providing wide area network, 2. Supporting current business, 3. Allowing more opportunities and development programs, and 4. Gaining returns from sharing uses of technologies and services. Information infrastructure at the national level can be considered to be an information system all over a country.
On the other hand, when innovative activities are inspired on the bases of cultural factors and institutional arrangements, they are largely induced by the opportunities created through the uses of infrastructure construction, especially in the information infrastructure. Thus the information system is closely related with the systems of innovation at national as well as the industrial level. This research identifies necessary as well as sufficient conditions for innovation and development of new technologies and intends to investigate the technology landscape for a digital society in the Asia-Pacific areas.
In sum, the main purpose of this project is of two-fold:
1. To assess and evaluate the degree and differences of information superhighway constructing and the impacts on innovative activities with new emerging technologies.
2. To provide some bases for Asia-Pacific economies to form cooperative policy forum toward the information society. The information infrastructure is defined as the structural base for generating, organizing, utilizing, applying information, and for innovative activities of providing new information, even revolving the structural base of all sorts of information flow.