The Age of Disruption

How do you see science and technology changing competition?

The margin for making mistakes has gotten much smaller. In a commodity economy, it's hard to kill off your business. You still have the mine. You still have oil wells. You can always rebuild. In a knowledge economy, if you make a mistake, you're in trouble. You can go back to the 1970s for an example. The Microsoft of the 1970s, the company that the U.S. Department of Justice was afraid of, was Xerox. It was the dominant technology company: It had the mouse, the browser, Xerox PARC. Back then, the question was, how is anyone ever going to take on Xerox?

The same thing happens in countries. When a country doesn't pay attention to the only thing that matters -- it's citizen shareholders -- those citizen shareholders get bought up like free agents. Brains has become a market. Right now, in Silicon Valley, there are about 4,000 Indians and Chinese who generate more wealth than all of the exports of India.

If you want to compete in bioinformatics, first you need to compete for really smart people. You need really smart people who understand how to manipulate nanomolecules. Those really smart people want to live someplace where they're safe, where there are other really smart people around, where there's financing, and where there's a future. Today, 15% of the PhDs in science and technology who come here from China go back to China. The other 85% say that this is a better place to do business. The people today who are talented don't want to work on the basis of citizenship anymore. They work on the basis of a knowledge nation.

Give us some idea of the relative scale or importance of the changes you chronicle in your book.

Let's imagine for a second that we're still having this conversation, but let's change the date and the place. Let's say that it's October 12, 1492, and we're in London, Paris, or Madrid. We wouldn't have a clue that the entire balance of power in the world had shifted that day. The first printed map won't appear until 1503. But just because we don't understand the magnitude of the change doesn't mean that the change hasn't happened.

A very similar thing to October 12, 1492 happened this year: On February 12, 2001, you and I could see the entire human genome on our computers. We still don't know what it means. It looks really complicated. But I can tell you that our grandchildren are going to remember that date. There is going to be the pregenomic era and the postgenomic era. And the first companies to get it, the first people to get it, those are going to be the dominant societies on this planet in the next century.

Alan M. Webber (awebber@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company founding editor. Contact Juan Enriquez by email (enriquez@mediaone.net).