Chris Dixon

To me, health care will be the biggest industry to change. Because the information revolution is happening in the context of two other revolutions which have not yet reached “optimal structure.” (1) The “evidence based medicine” revolution, and (2) the “pay for outcomes” revolution. These two, when combined with the ongoing computational revolution, could mean that the changes in medicine will be deeper and more fundamental. It could also mean that the impact of IT will be stunted because the shifting landscape is daunting to entrepreneurs who aren’t native to medicine.

I tend to think the former (that IT + rational, scientific healthcare will be *the* revolution of our lifetime). And I suspect the winners and losers will be amplified because of it.

Are computing and the internet better considered as distinct (related but not lumped together) technological revolutions?

Computing was more easily harnessed by existing institutions/industries; networks are less easily harnessed and more dangerous to existing institutions, because they tend to make institutions more porous and less relevant .

Communication tools are already ahead in the deployment phase and it’ll probably never slow down. Vision, travel, entertainment, banking, commerce (not just online), civil and mechanical engineering will be big industries alongside education and healthcare. This will last till the kids who’re born in the time of augmented reality grows up and build things.

- Where will this innovation take place?

Ans: Everywhere!

There is one big business you left out – the biggest one of all with maybe the most potential – government. Not that many entrepreneurs really want to build a business that targets government.

Maybe the counter-intuitive play is to focus there.

Finance is the other mega information heavy industry that is ripe for disruption, to my mind.

Thinking about Perez – the fifth revolution has looked different to the first four. If we lump PCs and the internet together then the volatile middle phase has been going on for a v-e-r-y-l-o-n-g-t-i-m-e, and if we separate them then the sixth revolution started before the deployment phase of the fifth had long to play out. I think that viewing the PC and internet as separate revolutions better explains what I’ve seen – we’ve had the lion’s share of improvements across all industries from plain old computers, but we’ve barely started with networks. You can see this in the companies that lead the revolutions too. Dell has just gone private, HP is in terminal decline, Microsoft is running to stand still, whilst Google, Facebook and Amazon are growing fast.

Chris the current phase of smartphone growth and tablets in the enterprise is another deployment phase in this case?

The global nature of the internet, the efficiency of better cheaper business models and speed with which new ideas can spread, and the network effects that lead to winner take all scenarios make me wonder – is this deployment phase likely to be shorter than in the past? And will the benefit in terms of profitable companies be as widely dispersed? Sure there will be lots of good ideas along the way using the power of IT/Mobile, but ultimately will a relatively smaller number of companies take away huge amounts of the profits in this phase? Do we think this will be in lots of new companies – or the companies controlling the large networks?

Nice way to contextualize tech innovation. I see that one other commenters mentioned the government as an industry primed for deployment. I couldn’t agree more. I and two partners recently started GovTribe (facebook.com/GovTribe), a s/w company targeting the government contracting industry. “…information-intensive mega-industries that have been only superficially affected by the Internet thus far.” Couldn’t have said it better.

I wrote a blog post for our site inspired by the questions you raise here. http://govtribe.com/blog/2013/2/14/moving-up-the-stack