January 12, 2017
Interview with Marina Gorbis, author of the book The Nature Of The Future
Mike Carruthers: The way we work is changing. Many things that used to be done by large organizations are now being done collectively by individuals.
Marina Gorbis: A very familiar example is Wikipedia where anybody can contribute from large contributions to small contributions but together we’re creating something that no one could create on his own or her own.
Marina Gorbis Executive Director for the Institute of the Future and author of the book, The Nature Of The Future, says we’re seeing this more and more with products and business ideas.
Today you can have an idea for a product you can go to a place like Tech Shop which is basically that has a lot of manufacturing resources and equipment and prototype your product there – it’s a community, it’s a membership organization, you can get advice from other people. You can go to Kick Starter and get funding to actually manufacture the product.
This is allowing business to be done without being a big business.
When I was interviewing some people who were doing that they said you know I don’t need to hire more people I’m pretty happy having 2, 3, 5 people. And part of it is that we have these resources that previously were not assessable to you. You had to GM or you had to be Ford to have this large manufacturing facility. In some ways we’re becoming kind of an organization of 1, as 1 person you can get all the needed resources which previously you couldn’t do.
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