Deloitte's Center for the Edge researches and analyzes issues and topics related to corporate growth. It is run by two Silicon Valley luminaries - John Hagel and John Seely Brown.
They recently released The Hero's Jouney Through the Landscape of the Future, which focuses on a topic we've long covered - barbell industrial structures.
These industry structures consist of a relatively few giant corporations on one end, a narrow middle consisting of a shrinking number of mid-sized firms, and a large and growing number of small, micro and one person (solopreneur) firms on the other end.
This concept has been around a long time. We first noticed this in a 2006 McKinsey report.
We built upon this idea in the Intuit Future of Small Business report The New Artisan Economy in 2008 where we identified increasingly collaborative ecosystems developing between big and small/solo businesses. Since then we've been researching this trend and report on it regularly in our Industry Structure section.
Deloitte describes the barbell as fragmentation and consolidation. Key quote from their report:
... a new economic landscape is beginning to emerge in which a relatively few large, concentrated players will provide infrastructure, platforms, and services that support many fragmented, niche players. In this way, both large players and small will coexist and reinforce each other.
The chart below provides a good summary of Deloitte's view of the future.
The Deloitte report pushes the research ball forward and provides new insights and ideas about the direction industry structures are going. It's well worth reading by anyone impacted by industry change - which is pretty much all of us.
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