Looking beyond what exists already

It is easy to see how confusing and incomprehensible the environment of the Internet can be for newcomers to the world of e-business, but, it is not generally appreciated how even people experienced in communication technology can be equally confused and overwhelmed by the magnitude and lack of stability of the knowledge base. There is too much to know and everything is constantly changing. This view point has been endorsed over and over again in the many different areas of e-business that I've explored.

An even bigger problem is that most people approach the e-business environment with the idea that they should adapt this technology to what they know already. They hate the idea that this is a new environment where they have to forget the past and start from scratch. They seldom accept that this represents a totally new experience where they have to look for opportunities which currently doesn't exist. This is probably why so many young people succeed in this environment: they are not handicapped with attitudes and conceptual frameworks that they have inherited from the pre Information Age.

At the start of writing this trilogy, even though I'd been involved in the industry for many years, I certainly didn't understand or even know about all the complexities involved in e-business technology. However, I did have enough sense to realise I didn't know everything and, more importantly, that I couldn't even hope to be able to learn it all. This left me with the choice of choosing a narrow area of specialty where I could have complete and authoritative knowledge of specifics, or, working at a higher level of system organisation where I'd need a firm grasp of the general.

My preference was to look at the general rather than the particular. After all, this had been my preference over many years as an entrepreneur. However, I'd spent the previous few years in the world of the specialists – specialising in multimedia programming – and I knew that most of the more successful businesses coming out of the information environment were based upon exploiting and developing niche areas of technology.

This state of affairs represented a paradox because although niche technical specialists might have to use strategies to become successful in their chosen areas, they were fundamentally tacticians whose activities are ordered up by strategists working at a higher level of organisation – the business level. In this way, these technical niche specialists are at the same level of system organisation as store keepers, who supply picks and shovels to gold-miners: reliant upon the exploration and initiatives of others.

For this system of dependency to be maintained, there has to be profitable outcomes for at least some of the explorers and initiators, otherwise the whole system breaks down. This is the area I personally find most interesting – at the business level: finding the gold not providing the picks and shovels

To work at the business level, it is necessary to use conceptual models rather than hard facts. However, the problem with e-business is that the field is so new and so changeable that no generally accepted conceptual models have yet emerged. Conventional conceptual models used for businesses in the pre Internet, industrial world don't seem to apply in the environment of mass connectivity.

For me, this meant starting from basics: using the fundamental building blocks of business and applying them in new ways. Firstly, in "The Entrepreneurial Web", creating an abstract framework to think about e-business. Secondly, in "The Ultimate Game of Strategy" to create conceptual tools.

Many readers of the chapters in these two books were impatient with this approach because it wasn't dealing with what they were really interested in, which was to be able to get started straight away to create practical, real life, e-business ventures. They saw my approach as too theoretical and scholarly, with little relevance to what was happening in the real and practical world of e-business.

They did seem to have a good point at the time because those first two books were written at the time of the dot-com bubble, when many people were making fortunes without bothering to take into account any of the more esoteric aspects of the new communication environment. People were just plunging in, with traditional, Industrial Age concepts, and making lots of money.

However, the bursting of the dot-com bubble justified the time I'd spent considering the more theoretical implications of the new information environment. Those who had plunged in during those early days – trading on other people's ignorance and misconceptions – were stopped dead in their tracks and left wondering where to go next. On the other hand, I was armed with many useful conceptual tools that allowed me to look beyond the day to day activity towards a more pragmatic future of the e-business environment.

Perhaps the most significant effect this theorising had on my thinking was to see e-businesses quite differently from the way businesses had been viewed in the past. Instead of seeing e-businesses in terms of structured forms, fixed physical locations, managed organisation and definable assets, I began to see e-businesses as more nebulous entities: as functions within a rapidly changing, universal dynamic system.

From this perspective, it becomes apparent that the most likely route to creating any successful e-businesses wouldn't be about adapting the new technology to established business solutions, but, to use the communication environment to produce solutions that have no parallel in the everyday world of bricks and mortar. This means using the imagination to explore not the businesses that are already in existence today, but, to look for opportunities that might emerge from the more bizarre and unusual properties of the Internet environment

This chapter is about seeing e-business in this light. We are not going to look at conventional business practices and investigate how we can put them on the Web, we are going to explore the unusual and the weird, looking for a breakthrough that might lead us to discover a completely new approach to solving problems.

Instead of looking to these old world business solutions for inspiration we are going to use a green frog approach and start from scratch, seeing e-business as a function of indefinite form in a system space. It is only by looking at e-businesses in this abstract way that it will be possible to create a viable e-business that is likely to survive and prosper in such a fast changing, competitive world.