Talent Communities

The internet is changing the world in very fundamental ways. Many of the changes lie before us as opportunities. Besides products and services the internet is increasingly demanding that we create fundamentally new organization structures and management techniques that let us outsource greater and greater parts of the production process.
It is creating a world of David Ricardo and Ronald Coase. Ricardo, a political economist, popularized the idea of comparative advantage. It is his theories that form much of the academic underpinning in favor of outsourcing. Ronald Coase, who was awarded the Nobel prize for Economics in 1991, popularized the theory of Transaction Cost Economics. Bringing down transaction costs, makes it easier to outsource. Internet technologies are making it possible to bring down transaction costs to a level where it becomes possible to outsource components of work that were hitherto considered an internal function.
There are organizations (like The Gerson Lehrman Group Councils ) that are being setup that specialize in creating professional networks for consulting and even provide temporary CxOs.
The concept is being extended to what are called talent networks and talent communities.
Jon Hagel (of Netgain fame), in his talk on Web 2.0 at NASSCOM suggested that Indian IT service companies need to innovate and create fundamentally different organizational ways to build and deliver IT products and services that Indian IT companies need to build scalable talent networks encompassing a broad range of smaller, more specialized companies.