You may have to change your business model in 2007

In today’s USAToday, Section B, there is an interesting review of three new books. If you believe the messages, you may have to change your business model.

Kevin Maney, their technology columnist, starts with an arresting comment: “The ‘company,’ as we’ve known it for almost a century, is about to go the way of vinyl albums, floppy disks and perked coffee.”

The economist Ronald Coase asserted in 1937 that companies exist because of transaction costs. Assembling the right people and resources inside an organization is the most efficient way to address tasks. Today, however, technology may challenge that method of organization. And three books address new technological methods of creating commerce. They promise to be the hot, new works of 2007.

See Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams.

“Doing business is becoming no more efficient inside a company vs. doing the same stuff outside a company – or without a company at all. … So if a core reason companies exist is to lower transaction costs, what happens if that reason goes away? Companies could run into an identity crisis that will hit them like the talkies hit Charlie Chaplain.”

Also see The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, and Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape by Henry Chesbrough.

Categorized in: Management