20150316SXSW15_112I spend much of my day hearing voices in my social media monitoring center, making them actionable using advanced analytics and integrating the learnings into business processes that make an impact – and yet I know this is the beginning of the impact that the forces of collaboration-empowered technology will have on everything we do. I also teach a long-distance webinar on emerging business models for the University of Tennessee.  This simultaneous convergence makes my Business (r)Evoution 2025 class particularly fun: We answer the question of where are the trajectories of these changes are leading, and how can you best protect your business (and yourself)?

We are early in the period of the connected consumer. Once, we met in front and our homes and talked about who had the best deals on whatever was important. Now, that’s augmented with Connected Consumerism, to borrow a term from Brain Solis. Everyone has an audience, and every member of the audience has an audience.

This collaboration has changed the Internet into a place that rivals any physical place where people learn, act, react and transact – and affect sxsw13d2sat__171transactions in real time. (Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for giving me the building blocks for that idea). But the collaboration goes far beyond that – into an economy where we start getting more products from each other rather than larger companies. Jeremiah Owyang calls this the Collaborative Economy – and agree or disagree with the name, the principal is sound, and it’s affecting how companies of all sizes do business.

Take these, add big data – structured and unstructured masses of metrics, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, mobile device advances, enabling intelligence in wearables, cars, buildings, toys – and almost everything to create an Internet of Things, oor IoT. We now have a lot to cover in this class!

There is a proverb often credited to the Chinese that wishes you the benefits of living in uninteresting times. These certainly are not uninteresting times- but it gives us a lot to discuss!

image courtesy: Wayne Kurtzman

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