Large institutions, both public and private, should be afraid, very afraid. Free agents are connected, enabled, and riled up.

We had visitors from a huge IT company at BIF last week and no surprise they immediately noticed our IT room.  “So, this is your IT room?” Well it isn’t exactly a room.  More like a collection of gadgets lined up next to the entrance in clear view.  I walk by it every day and have never really thought twice about it.

Yes, that’s it.  All we need on site to make the place go, I said. Everything else is in the cloud. It is amazing if you think about it.  We are not an exception as free agents and entrepreneurs everywhere are able to behave, access capabilities, and compete like large companies.  I would assert more nimbly than most large organizations.

Free agents and start up enterprises can be up and running immediately.  All you need is a broadband connection, a wireless router, and computers.  My office travels with me. I use my MacBook and iPhone.  Everyone in the BIF office uses Google’s Gmail, contacts, and calendar.  Our BIF web presence and Innovation Story Studio is hosted off site and our Experience Lab communities and BIF Book Group are hosted on Ning.  We access an ASP version of Salesforce.com for our CRM platform.

We even debated if we should have landline phones in the office since all of us have cell phones.  We wimped out and went with the phones hoping it would make us look more substantial.  I doubt it has and notice most of us use our cell phones anyway.

All of this capability was up and working on day one and most of it is free.  It all scales as we add staff and new projects in our Experience Labs.  Well almost all of it scales.  The landline phone system doesn’t!  We also get the benefit of new features immediately as they come on stream and can tailor configurations to meet our needs as BIF grows.  And it all works without an IT department.  Of course we are lucky to have Tori Drew, our talented operations leader, to keep us all connected and communicating.

The biggest reason that institutions should be afraid is not that free agents and start up enterprises can leverage infrastructure quickly and inexpensively, although that alone is worrisome.  It is because large institutions have spent years building infrastructure that is designed for efficiencies inside the enterprise and not for connecting and communicating with the rest of us.  Institutions are inwardly focused and their enterprise systems make it difficult if not impossible to take advantage of innovation opportunities that are only possible by sourcing ideas, capabilities, and collaborations outside of the enterprise.

The biggest opportunities to create value and to solve the big social issues we face including health care, education, and energy will be found in the gray areas between sectors, silos, and disciplines.  Institutions, public and private, are ill prepared to take advantage of these innovation opportunities and are hindered by existing enterprise infrastructure and platforms. On the other hand free agents and entrepreneurs are wired for collaboration literally and figuratively.  They see the opportunities between institutional silos and know how to use open platforms to connect innovators in purposeful ways.

We are just getting started. Free agents and entrepreneurs are experimenting to take advantage of this new potential to self organize.   Social media enabled communities are beginning to form that will go well beyond exchanging ideas to organizing for action.  Free agents are realizing that they don’t have to wait for institutions to act.  Self-organized free agents can and will act on their own.

Large institutions, both public and private, should be afraid, very afraid. Free agents are connected, enabled, and riled up.