xxi Acknowledgment I am very grateful to many people who have been helping me during the last three years of editorial work. But there are a number of persons who inspired and supported me most, and I want to refer to them in particular. Kristin Klinger was one of my angels. I want to thank her for trusting me, for accept- ing me as a collaborator, and for introducing me to Ms. Heather Probst. Kristin, without your trust, this project would never have been started. Heather, you are the other angel who has been watching over me, and encouraged me, and made me confident that I can do what I had to do. Your emotional support was superb and I will always be grateful for it. Without your efforts to support me, this editorial project would never have been possible. I must say that Kristin Klinger and Heather Probst got me into the editorial activity that results today in this book. Other people, like IGI Global team members, colleagues, collaborators, authors, and guest editors, helped me along the way and I want to express my gratitude to them all. In the beginning of 2009, I had the opportunity to start an editorial project together with IGI Global, which was something that made me feel good and somehow important. I was very confident that I would be able to handle it, based on my previous 6 years experience in the area of managing academic journals, but the true challenge came along with the suggested topic for the new journal. When Kristin Klinger mentioned "Innovation in the Digital Economy," I suddenly realized that things are not always that easy in life and that I was given the opportunity to take the challenge and to get into a new world and understand- ing, or to leave it and keep staying in my comfortable and often "easy to be theoretically understood" universe. I would like to have enough reasons to tell you that it was the courage that triggered me into the acceptance of the challenge, but looking back in time, I must admit that it was a kind of uncon- sciousness that made me focus on administrative details and not on the essence of what was going to begin. Nearly three years later, I can accept that managing the International Journal of Innovation in the Digital Economy challenged many things: my values in life, my understanding of the new trends in Economics, my interaction with the authors I was working with, as well as my whole perspective about how to run an editorial activity. For all these, I must thank all the people, known and unknown, who taught me that the real world is very often different than the world that we economists think it would be; that the simplicity of our theoretical approaches is actually stressed, challenged, or at least flavored by human feelings, hopes, pains and other valuable things that usually we don't take into consideration as being uncomfortable and difficult to be captured in our standard models. The people I am going to write about in the preface, as well as their contributions to the International Journal of Innovation in the Digital Economy, are part of a world in which not only the scientific result is important, but also its impact on the society.