I’ve found in my experience that while traditional styles of thinking about business do in fact work, they’re ussually most effective when the business in question has a lot of money to throw around on things like marketing and physical resources. The second wave of Ecommerce brings to the forefront a different style of entrepeneur, marketer and business person, it brings about the social aspect of marketing, where word of mouth can spread a hundred times over, which, I personally think, that personality and ‘who you know’ far outstrips ‘what you know’.

On the basis of success through many of these ‘new age’ business people, we have to wonder if the old school definition of ‘expert’ really applies.

This article was really interesting and gets you thinking… What exactly determines an expert when it comes to business, entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurship? And, is there any advantage to being an expert? The paper would almost seem to move towards indicating that perhaps it is some sort of classical conditioning process that creates experts (in that they’ve been trained to become an expert), and that very training makes it harder for them to adapt to new business opportunities, changes in the marketplace, etc.

Really interesting stuff.

The work of Michael Raynor and Clayton Christensen is very relevant to this topic:
http://photonplaza.blogspot.com/2004_05_23_photonplaza_archive.html#108532440003804590