Bio

Theo Lynn is Professor of Digital Business at DCU Business School. He specializes in the role of digital technologies in transforming business and society. His main teaching areas are strategy and digital marketing. He has been published widely and is the Series Editor on the Palgrave Studies in Digital Business & Enabling Technologies. Previously, he has led three research centers and has held several senior academic positions within DCU. He has won over 250 grants representing over €25m in total project funding. He was a PI on the H2020-CloudLightning Project (2015-2017) and H2020-RECAP Project (2017-2019) and is currently a Co-PI on H2020-MENAPreneurs (2022-2024) and AHRC-TOHIF (2021-2023). Professor Lynn received a Bachelor in Business and Legal Studies, an MBS (Management Information Systems) and a PhD (Law), all from University College Dublin. He is an Expert Evaluator for the European Commission and an International Research Fellow at the Information Society Law Center (ISLC) at the Università degli Studi di Milan.

Project

A longitudinal study of organizational adoption of Internet technology in European microstates pre- and post-COVID-19 While at Faber, I propose to work on a study of Internet technology access, use, and outcomes by organizations in the six European microstates – Andorra, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, San Marino, and the Vatican City – using an organization’s decision to use a website (and associated technologies) as a proxy for its degree of digitization. By using websites, one can explore a wider range of organizations representing different sectors and size and can explore marketing outcomes using website traffic data sourced from Tranco, Cisco and Majestic, and where possible financial information sourced from commercial databases. This provides us with evidence regarding potential determinants of organizational digital divides amongst the smaller European nations over time and accordingly informs policy interventions. As both grey literature and emerging empirical research suggests an acceleration of digital adoption by organizations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I will examine Internet technology adoption longitudinally and thus measure the impact of COVID-19 in the acceleration of website technology adoption in these microstates.