Don Tapscott - Twelve Themes of the New Economy - 1996
Don Tapscott has written about the impact of digital networking on our economy. In The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (1995) and in a more recent book, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (1998), he forecasts the coming influence of the demographic of wired kids born since 1978. The key technology is the I-way:
Just as the highway system and electrical power grid were the infrastructure for the industrialist economy, so our information networks will be highways for the new economy. - Don Tapscott
The Twelve Themes of the New Economy (1996)
At the heart of Tapscott's analysis are twelve themes which differentiate the new economy from the old:
- Knowledge is everything — from smart clothes to smart roads.
- Digital not analog — email, not post office.
- Virtual means physical things can become virtual — from virtual ballot boxes to the virtual job.
- Molecularization of old organizations are replaced by dynamic clusters of individuals.
- Internetworking through clusters networks rather than hierarchies.
- Disintermediation of the middle functions between consumers and producers are being eliminated through digital networks.
- Convergence Computing, communications, and content industries are converging to become the leading economic sector.
- Innovation Obsolete your own products. If you don't do it first, your competitors will... If it ain't broke, break it before your competitors do.
- Prosumption through customization combining production and consumption.
- Immediacy becomes a key driver — just in time is everything.
- Globalization with transnational systems.
- Discordance issues are rising due to as unprecedented social conflicts.
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