Don Tapscott Quotes

The world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic as that of the Industrial Revolution.

Every technological revolution takes about 50 years.

Industrialization based on machinery, already referred to as a characteristic of our age, is but one aspect of the revolution that is being wrought by technology.

The industrial age was not about craftspeople trading peer to peer. It was about stopping that. You weren't supposed to be a craftsperson, you were supposed to be an employee.

This notion that it is up to each person to innovate in some way flies in the face of the industrial age, but you know what, the industrial age is over.

In the industrial age and in analog clocks, a minute is some portion of an hour which is some portion of a day. You know, in the digital age, a minute is just a number. It's just 3:23. It's almost this absolute duration that doesn't have a connection to where the sun is or where our day is.

Whenever culture has gone through a radical change, as ours has - from industrial age to information age - there are people who will deny that things have changed; they resist it and refuse to change.

The U. S. Government operates like a five and dime store in an Ebay world.

Every industrial revolution brings along a learning revolution.

As our farms and factories grew more efficient, they accounted for a shrinking share of our economy. And the more productive agriculture and manufacturing became, the fewer people they employed.

The information revolution has changed people's perception of wealth. We originally said that land was wealth. Then we thought it was industrial production. Now we realize it's intellectual capital. The market is showing us that intellectual capital is far more important that money. This is a major change in the way the world works. the same thing that happened to the farmers during the Industrial Revolution is now happening to people in industry as we move into the information age.

The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability, and something is bound to come of it.

The economy in the next 20 to 25 years is going to change more than they did in the last 20, 25 years. And that's because exponential trends are affecting a bigger and bigger share of the economy. So we have some huge disruptions in store, and I can't predict exactly what the innovations are going to be. If I did, I would have already invented them. But I think they'll be comparable to the innovations we saw in the past 20, 25 years if not greater.

Intellectual property is the oil of the 21 century. Look at the richest men a hundred years ago; they all made their money extracting natural resources or moving them around. All today's richest men have made their money out of intellectual property.

For one thing, to predict the advent of big business was considering the conditions of Marx's day an achievement in itself.

When I was your age, we didn't have the Internet in our pants. We didn't even have the Internet not in our pants. That's how bad it was.

England was nothing, compared to continental nations until she had become commercial... until about the middle of the last century, when a number of ingenious and inventive men, without apparent relation to each other, arose in various parts of the kingdom, succeeded in giving an immense impulse to all the branches of the national industry; the result of which has been a harvest of wealth and prosperity, perhaps without a parallel in the history of the world.

Many pioneers of these industrial changes, it is true, became rich. But they acquired their wealth by supplying the public with motor cars, airplanes, radio sets, refrigerators, moving and talking pictures, and variety of less spectacular but no less useful innovations. These new products were certainly not an achievement of offices and bureaucrats.

I think we live in a period of profound transformation. Very similar to when we had a transition from agricultural societies to industrial societies.

What is applicable is to understand that first of all China has undergone a huge revolution in the last years. Anyone who saw China as I did in 1971 - and for that matter even in 1979, because not much had changed between 1971 and 1979 - and sees China today, knows one is in a different economic system.

The industrial age had only just begun; the planet had reached its Best Before date.

Turning points in human consciousness occur when new energy regimes converge with new communications revolutions, creating new economic eras.

You’re going to have some very amazing capabilities in the economy. When we have computers that can do more and more jobs, it’s going to change how we think about work. There’s no way around that. You can’t wish it away.

We always see shifts in employment. If you think about it, if you go back to 1800, it took 80 percent of the labor force to produce enough food for the country. Now it takes less than 3 percent. Well, the truth is that market systems move people around.

Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.