Fostering Recovery Through Metaverse Business Modelling. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on an Emerging Paradigm Shift

The past years’ uncertainties and pressures resulted from the pandemic, alongside new developments in social technology, 5G, cloud computing, augmented and virtual reality, generated the perfect setting for the metaverse to gain traction. Several companies found there’s a critical need to redefine the work environment and started exploring the metaverse concept beyond the entertainment sector. Thus, new tools for collaboration and data visualization within a digital shared space are being created, aiming for a fully immersive interaction between the virtual and the physical worlds within the next few years. While still in its early developments, the metaverse can be seen as an extension of the social media platforms, and an opportunity to leverage remote work even further. At the same time, an analysis of the metaverse through the lens of interdisciplinarity provides a key to understanding the new paradigm that is currently taking shape in Europe and across the world, dominated by the power of technology and its critical impact on geopolitics, on globalised socio-economic and monetary processes, on the essence of work and value creation – which are increasingly being shaped by intangible assets, dematerialised and deterritorialised flows and virtual currencies –, and on multilateral institutional developments and transnational regulation