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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."
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 -- 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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