Two trends seem to consistently dominate business coverage. One is the continued ability of new technologies to astound consumers and power businesses. The other is the stunning growth of emerging-market economies, from China and India to Brazil and South Korea, among others. Consider that in 1995, only 20 companies from emerging markets were listed on the Global Fortune 500. Today that number stands at 91.
The next trend, which is already taking shape, is how these two stories converge. Technologies such as cloud computing, mobile communications, and collaborative computing, in concert with the momentum of emerging-market growth, have formed a tipping point. As millions of new consumers and small-business operators — even in the most rural villages — become participants in the global economy, the economies we now call emerging will no longer merit the title. They will have fully emerged. Economic power will then be truly dispersed in a multipolar world, and the implications for businesses everywhere are profound.
Unwired World
If you travel to any of these countries, you can’t help but see how technology has enabled quantum leaps in the economies of emerging-market countries. While I have been to India many times, on a recent trip I was particularly impressed by the ways in which technology is enabling Indians to overcome challenges in their infrastructure, which has long been seen as one of the country’s greatest obstacles to real growth. Wireless telecommunications is connecting hundreds of millions of India’s rural citizens to the wider world, obviating the need for the time-consuming and costly effort of building a fixed-line network to every corner of the country. This same scenario is playing out all over the world, and is but one example of the stunning changes that are occurring.
A report recently published by Accenture, “Global Connection to Global Orchestration: Future Business Models…