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One of the abiding debates about the Internet is the extent to which it represents a step change in the way that societies - and economies - will function in the future. What is undeniable is that the Web has sparked a growing number of "free" and "open" movements that challenge current economic models - including the Free and Open Source Software movements, the Open Access Movement, Open Source Journalism, and Creative Commons. Many also believe that the peer-to-peer (P2P) phenomenon has significant implications for the traditional top-down model on which modern societies are based.

The challenge of the future is to make the transition from the management of individual departments to cooperation in thought and deed. Supply Chain Management - the cooperation of partners all along the value chain - makes this development from individual thinking to comprehensive cooperation possible. Top experts are needed to coordinate inter-company strategies and cooperation, cooperation with an international focus and the implementation of new concepts and technologies.

"Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream."

"This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity-and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation-and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control."

Alan Moore argues that we are now living in what many people now call the Networked Society, where we are creating, collaborating, in ways that defy the logic of our industrial era. Therefore we need to embrace the thinking of a No Straight Line World.

You read that right: No prices. Customers pay what and when they like, or not at all - it makes no difference to the cafe employees, who are instructed not to peek when people put money in the metal lock box.

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He writes about the Internet and the emergence of networked economy and society, as well as the organization of infrastructure, such as wireless communications.

Watch Yochai Benkler's talk on TED.com

Exploring the new paradigm for bringing forth game-changing innovation

"The Long Tail, in a nutshell The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare."

Students from the MA programme 'Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image' covered the event with posts on this blog. You'll find the sessions in the list below: