Following the digital big bang small businesses and start-ups will be able to compete with larger businesses as never before. And anyone will be able to afford to start a small business. Capital will no longer be the scarce resource – ideas, marketing and attitude will. Just look at Twitter.

For anyone will be able to afford to start-up a knowledge-driven company. PC’s and laptops will cost hundreds of dollars. Software and bandwidth will be free. Basements will become radio stations, film studios or software companies. Consultancies, design and service businesses will spring from kitchen tables – not requiring more than a few hundred dollars to set up and NEVER requiring Venture Capitalists or external funding in the early stages.

Entrepreneurship will be fostered at school and become the most popular subject at college. Indeed, most new companies will be founded from college seeds.

And product development will cost solely what an idea costs – nothing. Successful marketing will not require resources and cash – it will require the right idea at the right time, aimed lazer-like at the right audience. Digital marketing will charge solely based upon success. Companies will no longer need to take so much promotional risk – or pay in advance for marketing or advertising. Social media marketing will rule.

Successful small businesses will grow more rapidly into larger businesses, requiring increasingly less capital and in turn will need to master the new skills of the digital big bang corporation. And small businesses will crowd together in clouds of virtual networks with other small businesses to compete more effectively with large corporations across a portfolio of synergistic products and services.

The digital exchange organizers of tomorrow will bring together groups of relevant small businesses/start-ups that together will behave like large corporations and compete with them for customers, finance and projects.

The exchange leaders will provide customer relationships and training around systems, flexibility, start-up processes, new organizational structures, venture capital style internal financing, corporate governance, leadership development, training and employee well being, brand, market facing product/service synergy and shareholder relations.

The start-ups of tomorrow will sell ideas (Intellectual Property (IP)) directly to large companies and consumers as much as they will sell products and services. Entrepreneurs will not be obsessed with taking ideas to market and building companies, they will be obsessed with generating, packaging and selling their ideas (IP).

Vast online product/service exchanges will cost effectively and efficiently match product and service owner/creator with consumer. The next Ebay will be the Ebay of ideas and intellectual property (IP) and not that of tangible products. And its users will be able to buy or trade ideas and IP.

Entrepreneurs will study innovation, entrepreneurship and its start-up process and become experts at that rather than management or finance or any single discipline per se. Innovation and entrepreneurship will become the DNA of business, large and small, and anyone that wants to will be able to operate as an entrepreneur whether in a large or small business. But those who go out on their own will have the opportunity to amass the greatest wealth – and this time round with less capital risk. The only thing you will have to risk is your time, energy and reputation. Which is why education in entrepreneurship and innovation will become so vital.

Finally the sky will be the limit for small businesses and start-ups – their creativity the only boundary! Capital will no longer be the constraint. And the digital big bang will democratize entrepreneurship – for the 21st Century will let us all be an entrepreneur!