Business and Innovation in Networked Economy

Course Background and Introduction
The dynamic of our society, and particularly our new economy, is increasingly obeying the logic of networks. Understanding how networks work will be the key to understanding how the economy works.
We are connecting everything to everything.
Businesses and governments that are able to effectively employ information and communication technologies find more sophisticated and efficient ways of managing their external relationships and communications. This growing ICT usage helps form the critical mass of electronic transactions which supports a networked economy, both in terms of the network size and the demand for associated goods, services, labor and policy reform.
The critical characteristic of the networked economy is a radical decentralization of physical capital necessary for the production, storage, distribution, and processing of information, knowledge, and culture. This decentralization has caused a radical distribution of the practical capability to act in these areas, creating new levels of efficacy for individuals, who increasingly shift from being consumers to being users and producers. Individuals have now become capable of doing much more for themselves and for others, both alone and in vastly more effective loose collaborations with others.
In the industrial economy, hobbyists, no matter how committed, could not come together on the weekend and compete with the General Motors of the World. The degree of required concentrated physical capital made their decentralized, social practices ineffective as an economic production activity of any significant scale. Industrial information economy required models that were able to finance large-grained capital investment: government, through taxes; business, through market transactions; or organized non-profits, through