The lifespan of a Standard & Poor’s top 500 company has decreased from 61 years in 1958 to 18 years today.
In June of this year, our Chairman, John Chambers, predicted that 40% of today’s companies won’t exist within 10 years due to the rapidly changing technological landscape; a comment that didn’t even raise eyebrows.
This new era of change has been coined Digitisation.
What do I believe is Digitisation? In Cisco we talk about 50B things being connected to the internet by 2020 – the connection of the unconnected – bringing technology to the forefront by incorporating SMAC: Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud and now with an added I for the Internet of Everything.
SMAC-I has had a profound effect on the speed and cost of innovation.
In 2000 it cost an entrepreneur approximately $5M to launch a tech company. Today it cost’s on average $5K, a 1000x improvement and the time to market from Invention to Scale is dramatically reducing every day.
The result: I am seeing start-ups looking to disrupt and established companies getting their shops in order so they aren’t disrupted.
Authors
