Have you ever wondered about the forces behind globalization, mass customization, just in time delivery, virtual companies, and perfect information? Providing a platform to understand and navigate our rapidly advancing world, Techonomics: The Theory of Industrial Evolution explains the relationship between technology, economy, and organizations. Successful entrepreneur and prolific inventor Dr. H. Lee Martin shares a technologist's marketplace insights gained from a 15-year journey from the garage to the public market. Martin examines four foundations of healthy organizations: energy, communication, computation, and community. He then elucidates a method of tracking market progress, based on measuring both technology performance and economic cost, which provides a tool to consistently monitor advancement of any endeavor. The book looks at three contemporary trends based on electronic advancement, network expansion, and increasing productivity that are forcefully driving organizations in the 21st century. It explains examples of successful companies utilizing emerging operational business models. Adam Smith's laws of supply and demand are challenged daily by a world productive capacity that can overproduce manufactured goods and create infinite supplies of information. Providing examples of the value of e-commerce to business operations, Technomics delineates how to measure, compare, and maximize trends in key processes. It demonstrates how, in the dawning Virtual Age, organizations that effectively use ALL resources will continually increase productivity, and those that don't will fall behind.