ABSTRACT
Characteristics of change It is often argued that in today’s world the one trend we can predict with certainty is change. We live in a world where the speed of change is increasing exponentially with product life cycles measured in months rather than years. To place change in the context of the last thousand years of civilisation, four phases of economic development can be identifi ed with the time between each dramatically reducing. The pre-industrial agricultural economy lasted for over 2000 years. The commodities were natural resources; the assets were land; and the institutions were towns or villages. The next wave was the industrial economy spanning 250 years, where the commodities were products; assets were machinery, and the institutions were companies. The third wave was the service economy, already in decline with a foreseeable span of 80 years. The commodities are services and, the assets data; and the institutions are bureaucracies. We are currently entering into a knowledge economy which arguably may have a span of no more than 40 years. The commodity is ‘know-how’; assets are networks; the world wide web, and the institutions are communities of interest, often in dispersed locations.
