Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs

The industrial-age corporation is crumbling. The new form of wealth creation is the business web,and the new basis of wealth is digital capital. Schwab, eBay, Cisco, MP3, Linux, and dozens of other companies have transformed the rules of competition in their industries, seemingly overnight. They hijacked long-entrenched industry leaders with revolutionary offerings that surprised and delighted customers. These transformers could not and did not act alone: partners enabled them to move with stealth, speed, agility, and force. Such teams of innovators pioneered the business web, or "b-web" - the new platform for competition in the twenty-first century. B-webs - partner networks of producers, service providers, suppliers, infrastructure companies, and customers linked via digital channels - are destroying the firm as we have known it and generating wealth in entirely new ways.