Fields: On the Visibility of Flows in Digital Business

Abstract

Traditional investment and management tools fail to capture the complexities of a networked, digital business economy: SWOT analysis are static, accounting ratios are unidimensional. More importantly, those artifacts are unfit to deal with intangibles: by definition, the "material" information-based economies transact on. Here we present a Weak Signals technique - Vector Fields Flows - to dynamically profile strengths and opportunities in digital businesses, specially those heavily reliant on web search as source of revenue. We demonstrate how vector fields topology can in fact reveal liquidity changes in online businesses, with immediate applications in finance operations and market prospecting.