One result of an increasingly interconnected world — and we humans who are leveraging this network, adding ourselves as nodes to it — is that hundreds of thousands or millions of changes are occurring everywhere. Change is being accelerated because people can help people; ideas are propagated at the speed electrons can traverse the ‘net; and thoughts inform others thoughts which build upon one another quickly.
New companies are popping up all over, industries are being disrupted globally, and the fear most status quo holders have is about the disruption we will NOT see.
I’ve been observing this massive change enabled, in no small part, by the Internet-as-a-platform, Web/Enterprise 2.0 space and have slowly realized that no one, no analyst organization or set of thought leaders is going to be able to track and even identify disruption and emergence everywhere on our planet.
When I think about industries that have been disrupted by quickly emerging competitors in the past: railroads; vacuum tube companies; minicomputer makers; today’s newspaper and television providers; or even the printing industry my 94 year old father-in-law worked in for his entire career; I see now that disruption occurred but there was ample time for adaption. Companies adapted, industries figured out how to stay relevant or go away, economies discovered new revenue streams, and equilibrium was reached.
But what would happen if equilibrium is no longer within reach?
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