[Note:  A version of this column recently appeared in the Shift Age Newsletter.  Please feel free to sign up for a free subscription.]

I have been writing and speaking that IP is the wealth of the Shift Age for the last six years.  And over the last six years, this reality has become ever more apparent.  Recent headlines make this crystal clear.

In the Agricultural Age, those who owned the land created wealth.  In the Industrial Age, those who created and controlled production created wealth.  In the Information Age, those who created technology and brought it to market created wealth.  In the Shift Age, those who create or own Intellectual Property will create wealth.

Nine times I have spoken of this and have had a CEO or business owner tell me they had recently sold their company for more money than they had ever thought possible based on multiples of revenue or profit.  The reason was that the strategic buyer had a clear perception of the ability to scale up the seller’s IP and paid for that opportunity.

IP now represents more than 80% of the market cap of the S&P 500 in the United States.  People are finally understanding that corporate wealth – and revenue – is increasingly based on what Intellectual Property the company owns.

One of the recent examples of this is the Microsoft-AOL transaction.  Microsoft paid AOL more that $1 billion U.S. for 800 patents, or $1.3 million per patent.  Microsoft wanted the patents as they related to …

Earth Day is coming.  April 22 to be exact.  How I know is my email inbox.  Every day for the past few weeks I get pitches to write about some company’s new eco product.  The words LEED certified, Eco, Green, Recycled, Renewable have become an endless blur in the subject line of in-bound emails.  This is now a spring ritual.

Last year around this time I wrote a column entitled “Earth Century” . In it I mentioned that in the first two years of this blog in 2006 and 2007 I had focused a lot on alternative energy, renewable energy and peak oil.  This led me to being considered a thought shaper in the energy blogosphere.  The result, mentioned in last year’s column, has been that I am obviously on the list for pitching environment projects, products and initiatives.  So, from this perspective I feel like the world is continuing to think that Earth Day is a marketing event for promotion.

Please don’t get me wrong.  I support every single one of these efforts.  They are all worthy.  They are all moving us in the right direction.  The volume of these pitches increases every year, which is a good directional sign.  I embrace the efforts and the direction.  That said, we all have to give up this Earth Day thing.  It has become a day to toot one’s horn or to feel self-righteous about spending the day planting trees or picking up litter or whatever floats your ecological boat.  Well, …

[An apology to my regular and long time readers:  this has been the longest time I have ever gone between columns.  I have been starting work on my next book and have allowed that to take top priority during my writing time every day.  Now that it is well underway, I am back with another column on the New Health Age.  Thank you for your patience!]

In my last column I wrote about  the New Health Age, the new age of health care and medicine that we have entered.  The coming changes in the health care landscape in the United States and the incredible medical miracles rapidly coming will define this new age.

As written in the last column, the national conversation about health care reform in the United States has been largely driven by fear, misinformation and politics.  This means that it is a stupid conversation, largely defined by what your special interest is, whether you are Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal.  How sad and embarrassing.  One of the reasons to write “The New Health Age: The Future of Health Care in America” with my co-author Jonathan Fleece was to bring intelligence to this national conversation.

As I speak to audiences across this country and on radio interview programs, I attempt to provide easy ways to think about what is about to happen to the landscape of health care, regardless of what the Supreme Court will rule on the current law of the land.  Here is perhaps …

We have entered a new health age in this early part of the 21st century.  Humanity and particularly Americans are entering a new time of medical miracles and health care.  The thinking, delivery and economics of medicine and health care are changing and these changes will be accelerating in the next few years.

In the United States, the discussion about health care has largely been driven by fear, misinformation and manipulated by politicians.  Any discussion driven by these three forces is not an intelligent one.  That is why Jonathan Fleece and I have written “The New Health Age: The Future of Health Care in America”.  We wanted to write a book that would bring intelligence and understanding to the conversation about the future of health care in America.  As the quotes here show, this book is already being called THE book to read to better understand, and feel comfortable about the future landscape of health care in America.

Most people don’t realize that modern medicine is about 150 years old.  In 1865 Louis Pasteur identified germs as a significant cause of disease.  The Band-Aid was invented in 1920, penicillin in 1928 and the first flu vaccine in 1948. Cat scans were first used in the late 1970s.  So modern medicine is recent and is undergoing constant breakthroughs.  The current and soon to come medical miracles will usher in this New Health Age and will change how we think of both medicine and health care.

So to break through the …

The three forces of the Shift Age are the Flow to Global, the Flow to the Individual and the Accelerated Electronic Connectedness of the planet.  There are 7 billion humans alive today and 5.3 billion of them have cell phones.  3 billion people connect to the Internet every day.  These are the forces and the numbers that are shaping most of the change and many of the headlines in media today.

The Accelerated Electronic Connectedness of humanity is perhaps the most significant dynamic in the world today.  It amplifies the first two flows.  It is one of the two reasons that, 4 years ago I forecast that there would be, in 3-5 years, great upheavals in dictatorships and Islamic states ( I didn’t know to call it Arab Spring because I didn’t know it would be in a season).  The second common denominator of the Arab Spring is that 45 to 55% of the population of every country is under the age of 25.  Combine Millennials and Digital Natives with the ability to connect electronically and you have the commonality of the Arab Spring.

In the Shift Age, there is a new, rapid reality of Memes to Movements.  In a recently uploaded video I speak briefly about this.  Think about Occupy Wall Street.  As I wrote in a recent column, the Occupy movement went from some 75 people demonstrating in a small park in Manhattan to tens of thousands of people demonstrating in hundreds of cities in 80 …