Goods and services innovation improves people’s quality of life. At the same time, ICT
growth strengthens civil society through citizen participation, which also tends to improve
people’s quality of life. As Giddens notes:
In addition to the powerful influences of the global marketplace and new
communications technology, there is a groundswell of ‘globalization from
below’, involving many million of people as well as organized groups of
all kinds. An infrastructure of global civil society is being built by these
changes. It can be indexed by the growing number of non-governmental
organizations. In 1950 there were only two or three hundred. Now there
are more than 10,000 and the trend is still sharply upwards (Giddens 2000,
p. 123).