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"What do all these products have in common? They have been victims of big bang disruption, as Larry Downes and Paul Nunes explain in their stimulating new book, Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation (Penguin, 2014). Big bang disruption is large-scale fast-paced innovation that can disrupt stable businesses very rapidly. The strength of the book is to document what is known about the ongoing phenomenon of fast-paced large-scale disruption and the book gives many vivid examples. The book is less compelling in terms of what businesses should do about the problem in part because the writing is marred by the occasional overstatement and in part because big bang disruption is itself merely a symptom of a deeper economic phase change that is transforming the global economy."

"Now the zero-marginal cost revolution is beginning to affect other commercial sectors. The precipitating agent is an emerging general-purpose technology platform - the internet of things. The convergence of the communications internet with the fledgling renewable energy internet and automated logistics internet in a smart, inter-operable internet-of-things system is giving rise to a third industrial revolution."

"Imagine a corporation that engages in economic activity without guidance or direction from humans. Programmed with a mission statement-maximize profit for shareholders from the sale of widgets, for example-the corporation could own capital, enter contracts, and employ robots. People could even be hired for more creative tasks. Such an entity would live on the Internet, distributed across thousands or millions of nodes (stakeholders who host the DAC on their computer). DACs hold the potential to reduce friction in many markets, allowing for instantaneous, trust-less business transactions across the globe. Near-term applications of the DACs concept include peer-to-peer bond and stock trading, verifiable-yet-anonymous voting, and decentralised currency exchange. A DAC also wouldn't have to employ a board of directors, and a CEO's hefty pay cheque could be returned to shareholders in the form of dividends."