A seemingly illogical sequence

Throughout the writing of "The Entrepreneurial Web" and "The Ultimate Game of Strategy", the conclusions pointed again and again to e-business being about people rather than ideas or technology. This suggests that the first concern should be to find people to collaborate with.

This may seem an odd way to go about creating an e-business. Conventional business theory always assumes that you start with the business idea - then go on to find suitable people to help put that idea into practice. Yet, the implication is that a better strategy for creating an e-business might be to reverse that sequence: first find people to collaborate with and then look for the business opportunity.

This is not such an outrageous proposition as it might first appear: if you take into consideration that the Internet environment offers a huge variety of different ways in which wealth can be created. It is easy to think up ideas and identify probable profitable situations; hundreds of thousands of people are doings this all over the world all of the time. The problem is to be in a position to take full advantage of an opportunity when it is recognised. To be able to do this you would need to have the right combination of contacts and skill sets at hand.