The pace of change in ICT in recent years has been extraordinary. The changes are also transforming production methods and allowing new processes to be adopted. As the infrastructure for electronic commerce is improved, the number of new products and services will increase still further. The telephone systems, high speed computing capacity, internet and digital broadcasting that underlie the information highway offer huge potential. The information highway allows companies to transform the way they do business,creating and accessing new markets and changing the way they relate to their customers, suppliers and competitors.
Customers can tap into a whole new range of information about products and alternative suppliers.
Businesses can gain access to large amounts of commercial and technical information from around the world. The access to codified knowledge facilitates the spread of best practice and new ideas and increases the speed of innovation. All these developments increase the intensity of competition, call into question traditional sources of competitive advantage and carry implications for firm organisation. ICT has also allowed researchers to make much more rapid and extensive searches of published research results and draw upon the work of others. But it is not just that scientific knowledge is spreading more rapidly.