In the new Idea Economy, the ability to turn an idea into a new product or business has never been easier or more accessible. Competitors are everywhere, creating disruptive waves of new demands and opportunities.
Today, an entrepreneur with a good idea has access to all of the infrastructure and resources that a traditional Fortune 1000 company would have, and they can pay for it all with a credit card. They can rent compute on demand, get a SAAS ERP system, use PayPal or Square for transactions, they can market using Facebook or Google, and have FedEx run their supply chain.
The days of needing millions of dollars to launch a new company or bring a new idea to market are fading fast. You don’t have to look any further than more recent companies such as Vimeo, One Kings Lane or Dock to Dish–or with more common names like Salesforce, Airbnb, Netflix and Pandora to see how the Idea Economy is exploding.
And how about Uber? Uber’s impact has been dramatic since it launched its application to connect riders and drivers in 2009. Without owning a single car, it now serves more than 250 cities in 55 countries and has completely disrupted the taxi industry. San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency says that cab use has dropped 65 percent in San Francisco in two years.
This presents an opportunity and a challenge for most enterprises. Cloud, mobile, big data and analytics give you the tools to accelerate speed and time to value. Technology helps you combine applications and data to create dramatically new experiences and new markets.
Creating and delivering new business models, solutions and experiences requires harnessing new types of apps, data and risk as well as implementing new ways to build, operate and consume. Technology no longer simply supports the business, it IS the business.
But most organizations have been built with rigid, inflexible IT infrastructures that are costly to maintain and that make it difficult, if not impossible, to implement new ideas quickly. To succeed in today’s Idea Economy, you need an IT infrastructure that lets you pivot when the inevitable disruption arrives.