Treat your asset as liabilities
It means to recognize that physical assets (like real estate and manufacturing equipment) will limit your competitiveness in Cyberspace. This rule presents huge opportunities for small companies and entrepreneurs, whose advantage is that they have no fixed assets.
The idea is to invest in digital capabilities that will leverage the brand and the information assets of the organization.
Real world applications
examples from Killer App : Digital Strategies for market dominance by Larry Downes and Chunka Mui.
Bowne & Company (p. 144), a financial printing company, faced potential ruin when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enabled and mandated electronic filing. Bowne & Company adapted by using their experience in complicated filings and brand name to provide electronic filing, printing to "CD-ROM," and intranet solutions services to clients. Rather than contracting, Bowne & Co.'s business has grown more than 30% a year, and the company asserts that Internet filing could soon become the majority of business in the $1 billion financial printing market.
ChemConnect (p. 145) has constructed a virtual market for the trading of bulk and specialty chemicals, establishing itself as a new, information-intensive intermediary, threatening the value of manufacturers dedicated to sales forces. ChemConnect is using the Internet to collect price and inventory information to help coordinate buying and selling transactions, thereby reducing transactions costs. The company extracts significant margin from each transaction because they can provide superior information and expose inefficiencies and mark-ups in the local markets.
Tags : asset liabilities
