Lawrence Wilkinson: Well, the happy news for me, thank you Bill, is that coming at the end as I do of so thoughtful a panel, my alphabetically advantaged colleagues have covered essentially everything I might have wanted to say, and much, much more fruitfully. The happy thing for you and for Bill is that means I can go briskly.

By way of backdrop to what I hope will be some provocation to discussion, I'll note what is probably painfully obvious to everyone in this room. In the United States and indeed in much of the developed world, the urge to create unique value, to blaze new trails, to be one's own master, is extraordinarily widespread. You couple that with sufficient conviction, and you get, at least in nascent form, an entrepreneur. You stir in some skill and some measure of capital, and you get entrepreneurial activity of the sort that we're here to talk about.

The wonderful thing about times like these is that that conviction that gives an entrepreneur direction comes in literally every shade. Graham said in his unfortunately abridged remarks earlier that the thing about times like the ones we're in is that they're just enormously confusing. There was a clear past and there will surely be a somewhat clearer future anyway, but a very confusing present. In some measure, I'd submit, that's because if you can imagine it - "it" service, "it" product, "it" line of commerce of any sort - there's somebody afoot in the economy right now who has funded it and is trying to make it work. The conviction is just extraordinarily broadly based.

Now, what I'd like to do, in violation of Graham's wisdom and Terry's caution against trying to spot winners, is see if I can make four observations that are in the interest of trying to direct our attention if not to winners - because in the end I'd agree it can't be done - to those areas of activity or those themes that might turn out to characterize the entrepreneurs we'll look back on as significant or as defining of this next period into which we're going to move with their help.

The first one resonates off a point Michael Gibbons made in his remarks this morning when he observed that the searchlight of research, the focus of research, is shifting increasingly to the study of complex systems and, thus, to interdisciplinary activity. I'd suggest that the same kind of thing is true, importantly, in commerce and, more importantly to our purpose here, in entrepreneuring. David mentioned his wife Ruth Ann's distinction between better, faster, cheaper inventions that were investments that drive things, that make things incrementally better, and brave new world investments. Well, surely the brave new world investments and the activity they yield are what are going to take us to the next, different kind of future. So I'd suggest those entrepreneurs, however hairy their ideas may sound, who are finding opportunities that are orthogonal to traditional industry boundaries, are people, these heretics, people to whom we should be paying pretty close attention. Because while most of them will fail, some of them are going to turn out to be the people who are drawing the new lines. Hard stuff to do. We're not trained to do it. We're not even trained to look in that way.

Second, n the program notes for this session it's observed that with falling telecom costs, falling IT costs, barriers to entry in lots of lots of industries are plummeting. And surely that's true. Interestingly - and David was getting at this, I'd suggest, in his remarks - in very different ways, barriers to entry are beginning to rise again. They're rising not in cost-protected ways, but they're rising around issues like attention, rising in the creation of brands that conjure and repel competition from the space that the brands occupy. So those entrepreneurs who seem to you, looking like people who get it, that new barriers to entry can be created and protected, are folks we probably want to watch.
Thirdly, kind of a corollary, goes to an observation that's often made about what we often call a democratizing wave of technology, IT and telecoms -the phenomenon of this intermediation. It's certainly true that technology enters traditional markets and plays hell with middlemen. It's also true, however, that history would suggest and early indications here would suggest that there are a tremendous number of important and defining new opportunities that are emerging around the re-intermediation of markets. The provision of services that go to things like the making of marketplaces, trading opportunities in previously unfungible commodities or services. The provision of editorial value added, yeah, but I'd submit as importantly - David's Wine Spectator example's a good one for this purpose - curatorial value added. In a world of abundance, often we need help not so much choosing as knowing what we should care to choose.
Finally, then, the world of buyers' agentry. Increasingly, technology is going to enable humans and directly provide the ability of buyers to be extraordinarily powerful in transactions, effectively to issue RFPs for what they want. The entrepreneurs who figure out how to ride that gravitational force, if you will, stand to write for us the new rules of commerce.

Now, the fourth and final observation I'd make before an ultimate caution also goes to the phenomenon of democratization, but in a different sense. The world of mass production that we've grown up in, that I was educated to try to work in, was a world of choice. Those of us who learned to market in the '50s or '60s or '70s were taught how to position a product or a service to be chosen from among an array of products or services on offer. One of the implications of putting as much control as technology will put in the hands of consumers who want to exercise it, is that these consumers are going to become co-creators of what it is they consume. They're going to become partners of the vendors who provide it. They're going to become what Topler called years ago "prosumers." Now, there's lots to conjure with there, but I'd submit - because it's the most interesting dimension of this to me - that in a world in which that's the dominant flavor of transaction, the very character of marketing changes, from the rigor I was taught - the rigor of being chosen - to a world in which it's much more important to be invited. This is a world in which the sort of trust David was talking about is absolutely critical, a world in which the old order of market research and position simply doesn't accrue. So entrepreneurs who begin to understand how to be invited in that way - take a look at Amazon and a few other examples we could cite - begin to suggest dimensions of the new world into which we're going to be headed.

Now, the caution on which I'll end and throw it back to Bill goes back to Graham's comment, and Terry's, and many, many other folks - we are in midstream. It is - our work at GBN would suggest - not hard, it's impossible to predict what's going to lie on the other side of this transition we're going through. It's a clichè to observe that lots and lots of the entrepreneurs who will populate this transition, this sort of Darwinian effort to select out the defining new ways of doing business, lots of these entrepreneurs will fail. That much we all know. The thing that I've come to realize of late, both as an observer of this and also as a participant in some startups, is that what's trickier is not just that the rate of failure is high but that the half-life of success in a world like this is very short. This kind of a transition isn't a world in which there aren't any winners because there's lots of confusion; that would actually be pretty easy. This kind of transition is a world in which there are too many winners. They come and go with breathtaking rapidity. And so, it's a world in which managers have to learn to retrain themselves from the sort of protective imperialist instincts that most of us were raised with and learn instead to fail gracefully, to cannibalize, to move much more quickly off positions of seeming power than ever before it would have made sense to do. By the same token, those of us who are watching, trying to take stock of where this transition seems to be headed, need to be very careful, since we've been conditioned to think that winners write rules, to put too much stock in the way things are at any moment. This is Larry's point from this morning, "is-ism." This kind of tradition, our observation would suggest, isn't one in which much that we currently see in the way of winners is going to survive. Thank you. Bill, back to you.