The Coming Prosperity: How Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Economy

Today, everyone with a mobile phone holds in their palm a thousand times more computational power than was available to the NASA engineers working mission control on the day in 1969 when Neil Armstrong took humankind’s first step on the moon.

That the vast majority of alleged threats to humanity are, in fact, dwarfed by the magnitude of opportunities that exist in the twenty-first century.

That was understandable because, for the bulk of the twentieth century, basic research and big business were the primary vehicles of economic growth and prosperity.

(iii) Previously closed networks of production and knowledge are now open and accessible to creative and determined people everywhere. (iv) Open networks of production and communication are, in turn, enabling globally distributed collaboration and innovation on a massive, unprecedented scale.

For individuals, companies, and nations alike, it’s time to be what matters.

Once the system didn’t function normally, it came very close to not functioning at all.

Between 1995 and 2002 we in the US lost two million manufacturing jobs. China during the same time period? They lost fifteen million.)

The empty hand is the gap between idea and reality, between motion and action. It is the cognitive space for the truly unexpected. It is the habit and practice of creative preparedness. It is the boundary between order and adaptability. And, when put into use, and yet at the same time kept empty, it is entrepreneurship.

Urban sprawl and the traffic it engenders is an example of a paradox of prosperity—a

the real power of large open networks, like those enabled by mobile communications, is in the third dimension of network participation: recombination.