Predicting Google

After writing this morning's post, I was thinking about the supreme difficulty of accurately anticipating the new businesses and new business models that emerge in the world (i.e. that "stick"), and the even greater difficulty of anticipating what those new businesses then evolve to become/create/reshape.  Thinking first about the graphic from this morning (Figure 1), consider the "entrepreneurial experimentation" occurring in the Surface layer.

Part of the great challenge in knowing how the economy will ultimately be affected by the entire landscape of changes lies in this area, what roughly corresponds to the "Emergent Models" section of the original Infinite Economy landscape image (Figure 2).  This is an area of basically evolutionary action: variation and selection.  Out of this competitive space eventually emerges the businesses and business practices that go on to (re)define normal.

And this jumps us to thought leadership/consultant's s-curve from "Working the hype cycle, part 2" (Figure 3).  See the orange line the defines the "Application Gap?"  This is the space in which VCs and other investors are developing ever-greater interest in other people trying to develop new things and to make businesses out of new things.  This, of course, is where people are looking for "the next Google."

But of course you can't really know ahead of time what invention/innovation/new venture will succeed (i.e. stick).  That's why they're all bets.  But even if you could get really, really good at anticipating what new piece of technology or what new venture goes on to become established and mainstream, you still couldn't know what they will go on to do outside of their intended application or their original business plan.  It's essentially an issue of, to use Google as an example: Could the folks who invested in Google at their outset truly have been able to anticipate what they might yet do to shape broad economic change in a variety of areas, far beyond improving internet search?

I am certain that the answer is no.  So consider the difficulty in not just "picking winners" amongst all the emerging technologies and business models out there right now (in terms of what they're trying to do right now), and then anticipating how they will evolve to introduce even more fundamental economic changes beyond their original intents.