The Coming Entrepreneurial Era

Kevin Coleman is a highly skilled senior level project and program manager/advisor with experience leading projects with labor budgets ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to multi-million dollar budgets across multiple industries.

  Innovation   Manufacturing   Strategy  

Throughout history, we have experienced a number of tech boom cycles. The only difference is the duration and the magnitude that is experienced during the boom. If you look at these cycles, what is striking is the magnitude has continuously increased and the duration has continuously decreased. It would almost be a sure bet that the coming tech boom will follow that trend. That is where the similarities to previous tech eras end. This time it will be different--and significantly so.

During the Agrarian Age--which lasted thousands of years--agriculture was the primary source of jobs and money. The second distinctive period was the Industrial Age that lasted less than 100 years--and about half of the labor force was employed in manufacturing. Then came the Information Age, which lasted about 30 years and had the largest impact on the workforce with the most interacting with information technology.

A closer look at the accelerated pace of change as reported by McKinsey finds that the radio took nearly 40 years to reach 50 million, the television took over a dozen years and Twitter took an astonishing eight months.

Just about every time I interact at the executive level, I am asked what the next “big thing” will be. Until a few years ago, I shied away from a specific answer because the jury was out. However, for the last couple of years my answer has been the …

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