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"Today, Owyang-who is so enthusiastic about the notion that he left Altimeter to found Crowd Companies, which focuses exclusively on the trend-released the first noteworthy research into the state of the collaborative economy. If I hadn't been convinced of the significance of this trend, "Sharing is the New Buying" would have pushed me over the edge. (Late last year, Neville Hobson and I interviewed Jeremiah about his new venture for our podcast. You can hear the interview here.)"

Stigmergy 3.0: From ants to economies

"Machines are about to change what it means to be human. According to social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, they will undermine our sense of private property, take away our jobs and turn us into free agents in a new global "sharing economy". For good measure, they will also destroy capitalism before the middle of the 21st century."

"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."

"In The Nature Of The Future: Dispatches From The Socialstructed World, Marina Gorbis argues we are moving away from the depersonalized world of institutional production toward a new economy built on social connections and rewards--a process she calls socialstructing. Along with the exciting opportunities to create new kinds of social organizations--systems for producing not merely goods but also meaning, purpose, and greater good--there is a possibility that this form of creation will bring new challenges, new inequities, and new opportunities for abuse. We need to understand the potential disadvantages of socialstructing as well, if we are to minimize the potential pitfalls. The following is an excerpt from the book, available April 9."

"After nearly a half-century of digital technology advancement -- fueled by years of steady exponential gains from potent digital growth factors like Moore's Law and Gilder's Law -- businesses are still at the crossroads when it comes to applying technology to their business. Despite decades of largely automating existing processes instead of fundamentally rethinking what they do in digital terms, our organizations are now facing a horde of native digital 'gazelles' -- and now a growing bow wave of collaborative economy startups -- that are threatening not just disruption, but even potential elimination altogether."

"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."