A while back, I spent an afternoon with some folks at the Delaware Valley Industrial Resource Center (DVIRC, one of the MEP centers in Pennsylvania), becoming enlightened on a topic known as “digital intensity” (DI). The phrase, coined by Irene Petrick, a Penn State professor and managing director of the Trendscape Innovation Group, refers to how firms apply the forms of information technology to support their businesses (or not, as the case may be).

DI can range from essentially zero, where the company has no IT use, capability, or capacity (a rare but not unheard of condition), to a lot, i.e., the company has many uses and an infrastructure to support them. The reason that the latter is “a lot” and not a specific number is because the scale hasn’t yet been determined. All we know is that it’s a continuum of some sort: the more you have, the more digitally intense you are.

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