Jay Maharjan

Part I – Entrepreneurship in the conceptual economy – endless creative entrepreneurial opportunities

Never before in the history that entrepreneurs had so much flexibility and tools at their disposal like they have now. With the technology advancement and globalization of high speed internet, entrepreneurs have power to do amazing things. This is a welcoming news for knowledge entrepreneurs. Knowledge workers often had to rely on their parent organization or company to make significant impact – making it very hard to make it on their own. These days, with the availability of modern tools, even college students can compete with large multi-nationals. If you look at the recent history of innovation, numerous multi-national companies were results of college experiments – google, facebook, myspace.. just to name a few. This is just the beginning. The types of success eBay and Google experienced were very few and far in between. The frequency of entrepreneural success of this type will exponentially grow in the future. Technologies are maturing, costs of technology are going down drastically due to healthy competition. Barrier to entry is going down. What dot com boom promised prematurely – it is becoming a reality right now. Virtual communities, portals and social networking sites are already offering previews of what can be expected on the horizon.

Sky is the limit for virtual entrepreneurs in conceptual economy. Entrepreneurs never liked to follow rules anyway. This time around, they will truly get to lead the way in coming up with unique, unthinkable yet surprisingly simple online business models. The model that works in one geographic location may not work in another. But, the beauty is that conceptual entrepreneurs will adapt – and they will adapt quick. Case in point – the way book publishing is taking place around the world is changing. A teenager in Japan wrote a whole novel using text messaging to her blog – and her fans downloaded portions at a time.

(Photo: NewYorker)

The concept became so popular that when the hard copy of her novel came out, it was an instant best seller and she made over eight million dollars. Today, believe it or not – half of the top ten books sold in Japan are the results of mobile phone authors. Japan is usually one of the first countries to adopt to new mobile concepts. Usually, some concepts translate to other cultures and the others do not. Well, we may not see a cell phone novel on the New York Times list anytime soon.. but who knows..some variation of the concept may catch on in the US and Europe in the next decade. These are the changing times. Time magazine appropriately named you as the person of the year last year. You have tremendous amount of power to change the way you sustain as an entrepreneur or a consumer.

I consider Youtube generation as the first group to represent conceptual generation. Youtube generation is changing the way news is distributed. High traffic sites like TMZ.com and CNNs iReport already rely heavily on end-user generated content. Highly sophisticated cell phones have enabled regular people to capture live media footage and distribute to the world instantaneously. As conceptual economy matures, technology will also mature and truly open a platform for creativity and virtual entrepreneurship to flourish.

Beyond the more obvious virtual entrepreneurship opportunites, entrepreneurs will have tremendous capabilities to collaborate with resources from around the globe. Entrepreneurs will be leveraging on each other beyond outsourcing menial tasks but in a scale and scope unheard of ever before in the history.

One another concept that is catching on is the concept of replicating ideas that work in one country and taking it to other less developed markets. eBay became very popular early on in the US. Similar auction ideas mushroomed across the globe. Initially, local entrepreneurs started the wave and once the concept became successful locally – they got acquired by eBay for hefty sums. Indian version of eBay- Bazee.com was acquired in 2004 for whopping $ 50 million dollars. Similarly, eBay acquired iBazar, a French auction site and Tradera, Sweden’s leading online auction style marketplace.

In conceptual generation, we will see this trend growing in an exponential way. There are enough entrepreneurial ideas and concepts floating around the world that smart entrepreneurs can and will easily tap into and convert to viable ventures.

In factual note, America’s Gross National Product has grown over the years, but the actual, physical weight of the GNP has declined. Go figure. This clearly supports the emergence of the new economic model.

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