IN 1965 co-founder of Intel Gordon Moore published a paper stating that the processing speed of computers would double approximately every two years. This is commonly known as Moore’s Law and it still holds true today.

What Moore could not possibly have anticipated was just how much of an affect that this rate of change would have on our everyday lives, our culture and even the way we do businesses.

As technology has become more and more advanced, it’s become more affordable not only to individuals, but also to businesses, to the point where technology is now practically ubiquitous in modern life. It’s found everywhere and in everything around us.

It’s not hard to see that technology is changing our lives. The number of Facebook users has already surpassed the population of most countries, while services like Twitter and Skype seem to know no boundaries, often getting news out faster than broadcast media, empowering people to do more than ever before. And you only need to look around you to see the number of us with smart phones, digital cameras or tablet PCs.

When Moore wrote his law it’s likely that those technologies would have been benefiting the bigger businesses that could afford them, but these days the tables are turning in favour of the small business.

You just need to walk down any high street or into any industrial estate to see vacant buildings, ‘to let’ signs and posters for closing down sales in buildings that had stood for generations. The traditional business models are failing and old industries crumbling fast. Long-established businesses are finding themselves having to come up with strategies just to compete. Even our biggest organisations and best known brands are feverishly having to reinvent themselves to stay afloat.

Unfortunately, it’s no longer good enough to simply produce great products or provide outstanding services in order to survive, you need to be constantly innovating and providing additional benefits to retain customer loyalty.

Its often the smaller, more agile businesses that can think outside of the box and adapt more quickly to change that have the advantage over the bigger more established ones.

As you can see from the science and technology pages of this paper, as a region we are really good at creating new technologies and finding new ways to utilize them to improve our lives. So while it may be doom and gloom for the old business models, there are plenty of new opportunities.

David Coxon, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art