The Digital Economy ANNIVERSARY EDITION: Rethinking Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence, 2nd Edition

20th Anniversary Edition Commentary on Chapter 2: Twelve Themes of the New Economy

OF ALL THE CHAPTERS in The Digital Economy, first edition, this one received the biggest response. I remember Raymond “Ray” Lane, then-president of Oracle, saying that he required all of his senior management team to read the chapter.

In hindsight every one of the 12 themes holds up well today—with the topics of prosumption, immediacy, molecularization, discordance, and disintermediation along with its flipside “re-intermediation” standing out. Most organizations are still in the early days of trying to figure out how these themes apply to them.

The Architecture of the Firm

Probably the greatest contribution of the chapter was the first introduction of Nobel ...