Recently several authors have written about the new business age. Auhors like Peter Diamandis (Abundance: The Future is Better than you Think) talks about an age of abundance, but that has been true of economic progress since the the 15th Century. First in terms of new commodities that created wealth, then industrialization creating more wealth. For the last 500 years abundance has been increasing, so it is not that much of a prediction to say the future will be more abundant than the present.
The Shift Age by David Houle declaring the Shift Age as the successor to the Information Age. But that really doesn’t convey much for businesses to use. It talks about how advances in communication has changed how individuals interact with information and each other. But it involves more than simple communication. It also includes knowledge, advances in production, and a resulting advancement in expanding the human economy into both cyberspace and space.
The weakness in both books, and others, is that they ignore the history of business over the last five centuries, changes which resulted from the interaction of entrepreneurs with global society and their shaping of it. Understanding the history and impact of these interactions are critical to predicting the future of the business world. In this blog I plan to discuss how understanding those interactions and business innovations are key to understanding the future of business.
Thomas L. Matula 