The theme of this year’s Supernova is “Challenges for the Network Age,” because I believe we’ve reached the threshold of a dramatically new environment for business and society. We’ve moving from the Information Age to the Network Age. In the Information Age, computers and communications networks produced a global village and astounding gains in economic productivity. The Network Age incorporates those advances into an environment where anything connects to anything, anyone to anyone, anywhere, anytime. We’re not all the way there yet, but we’re far enough along to start seeing the effects. And that means we must confront both the inevitable conflicts of the great shift, as well as the inherent contradictions of a networked world. Only by doing so will we see the paths to durable innovation and business opportunities.

The Network Age poses ten basic challenges for all of us interested in the future of technology, media, and communications:

1. Scarcity and Abundance
   (Both are sources of value, yet they cannot coexist.)

2. Choice and Coordination
   (Users are in control, but don’t they need guides to avoid being overwhelmed?)

3. Aggregation and Fragmentation
   (Network effects mean that the big players get bigger, but at the same time, markets increasingly specialize and personalize.)

4. Stability and Disruption
   (True innovation requires disruption, but disruption can be painful and costly, especially where investment and trust are significant.)

5. Behavior and Rationality
   (People don’t always act according to models of rationality, especially when connected to one another, but our economic frameworks assume they do.)

6. Complexity and Simplicity
   (Complex adaptive systems produce emergent behavior and growth, but simplicity is a virtue… in both life and information technology.)

7. Openness
   (Everyone agrees it’s good, even essential in a networked environment, but no one can say what exactly it means, or how much openness is beneficial.)

8. Governance
   (How much do networks and their users need to be managed or protected, and where do those controls come from?)

9. Scale
   (The local is different from the global, whether the subject is enterprise collaboration or usage patterns or cloud computing infrastructure.)

10. Sustainability
    (How to build organizations and systems that endure, especially in a world whose delicate ecology is itself a form of scarcity.)

These issues manifest themselves in a series of choices about platforms, services, standards, business models, and investments. We’ll drill down on many of them at Supernova. If you are a large enterprise, these are the strategic questions you must address to thrive or even survive in a changing environment. If you are an entrepreneur, these are the parameters for your business model. If you are a technologist, these are the optimization constraints for your architectures and system designs. And if, like me, you’re simply curious about the future, these are tensions that will define the world we live in.

Supernova 2008 is built around these ten challenges. I’ll be posting about each of them at greater length in the weeks to come. The choices involved are especially difficult because the environment is evolving. The infrastructure is moving from PCs and the telephone network to mobile devices and broadband, while the software stack is moving from client-server Web browsers to cloud computing grids delivering dynamic objects, and the user base is increasingly comprised of Millennials who never knew a pre-network world. The good news is that times of great transformation are also massive opportunities.

So… are these the right challenges to pick? Are the questions really this difficult? And is the Network Age really as big a deal as I think it is? Supernova is an ongoing conversation among thought leaders from several communities: entrepreneurs, business practitioners, executives, investors, technologists, academics, and policy advocates. It’s a conversation that doesn’t start or finish with the physical conference, and isn’t limited to our speakers or attendees. Your reactions and responses to the ideas driving Supernova 2008 will help us all gain greater insights. I welcome your comments.