Digital transformation
Digital transformation permeates people's everyday lives with increasing speed and is permanently changing entire areas of life. The power and speed of change is more like a revolution than an evolution. The massive socio-technical change raises new questions that nations, companies and individuals have to deal with.
Mission and goal of the case study
The scenario involves the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) commissioning the new students – in their role as young academics – to carry out basic research on the effects of the digital transformation in various spheres of life of the Swiss population within the framework of a fictitious call for proposals. The task is to determine the negative and positive effects (areas of tension) within various areas of life, to identify the need for action, to derive recommendations for action for concrete measures and to elaborate them in the form of basic research. The SNSF will then the most substantiated technical contributions to submit proposals for targeted measures to the Confederation.
Due to the introduction of the English-language Assessment Year in 2013 and the associated bilingual Freshers’ Week, the case study has since been developed for two consecutive Freshers’ Weeks. Therefore, the topic of the case study for the Freshers’ Week of 2019 will once again be "Digitalisation – Switzerland in a time of change".