Innovation Ecosystem: A Global Shift in Capitalism?

On global and local scales, there is a large shift in how novel ideas and discoveries can quickly establish market relevance and commercial significance. The acquisition of Instagram by Facebook for US$ 1B may seem aberrant, but it clearly marks recent trend boundaries. As a co-founder of a small biotech, informatics based, academic startup company, this has led us to wonder how a young company like Instagram could have achieved such stunning success so quickly.

Klaus Schwab gave the opening speech at the 2012 World Economic Forum in Davos. In a synopsis of this speech, Dr. Schwab posted this observation that caught our attention:

"As I outlined in my opening address at Davos, capital is being superseded by creativity and the ability to innovate -- and therefore by human talents -- as the most important factors of production. If talent is becoming the decisive competitive factor, we can be confident in stating that capitalism is being replaced by 'talentism.' Just as capital replaced manual trades during the process of industrialization, capital is now giving way to human talent."

Here, capitalism purely refers to a mechanism by which economic markets (not political systems) grow and prosper. Post-indus- trialization, capital was king because it controlled the rate at which new infrastructure for manufacturing, transportation and sales could be built in order to support growing markets. In current markets where technology is king, it is the availability of human innovation and discovery that has now become a limiting currency. And here, we would rephrase Schwab's talentism as simply "creative expertise" --- novel discoveries pushing the boundaries of what we can do with our technology, according to a report in Huffington Post.  >>More here