The Nature of the Open Firm
In 1937 British economist Ronald Coase introduced the idea of Transaction cost and rationalized the creation of firms for running business. The reason for creating a firm according to him was to save transactions costs- by bringing in certain economic activities within the firm thereby avoiding everyday risk of contacting market for those services or resources. Since then, every theory of business strategy and organization assumes the bringing a set of economic activities within the gamut of an enterprise a priori and they only differ in deciding which activity to bring inside and which one to be left outside (core competence, core activity, dynamic enterprise examples). With the advent of floating fund of resources- namely open-ended data streams and freely available tools- unleashed by the web- it is possible to create a value offer- by assembling those resources without taking them inside of an enterprise. I have set an enterprise at http://educationonly.googlepages.com. Its value p