And so the nature of modern technology is bringing a new set of shifts: In the management of businesses, from optimizing production processes to creating new combinations—new products, new functionalities. From rationality to sense-making; from commodity-based companies to skill-based companies; from the purchase of components to the formation of

So we can say this: Conventional technologies, such as radar and electricity generation, feel like “technologies” because they are based upon physical phenomena. Nonconventional ones, such as contracts and legal systems, do not feel like technologies because they are based upon nonphysical “effects”—organizational or behavioral effects, or even

The more high-tech technology becomes, the less purely rational becomes the business of dealing with it. Entrepreneurship in advanced technology is not merely a matter of decision making. It is a matter of imposing a cognitive order on situations that are repeatedly ill-defined. Technology thinker John Seely Brown tells us that “management has

The first and most basic one is that a technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose.

We now have a more direct description of technology than saying it is a means to a purpose. A technology is a phenomenon captured and put to use. Or more accurately I should say it is a collection of phenomena captured and put to use. I use the word “captured” here, but many other words would do as well. I could say the phenomenon is harnessed,

Technology builds itself organically from itself, and this will be one of the themes of this book.

The second definition I will allow is a plural one: technology as an assemblage of practices and components.

In the generative economy, management derives its competitive advantage not from its stock of resources and its ability to transform these into finished goods, but from its ability to translate its stock of deep expertise into ever new strategic combinations. Reflecting this, national wealth derives not so much from the ownership of resources as

The economy, in a word, is becoming generative. Its focus is shifting from optimizing fixed operations into creating new combinations, new configurable offerings. For the entrepreneur creating these new combinations in a startup company, little is clear. He often does not know who his competitors will be. He does not know how well the new