What is the future of large corporations?

While some governments have acted in ways that may look inadequate, many large corporations have stepped up in ways that have become as impactful if not more than governments. And in many ways because these large corporations are global, they have impacted places and people that otherwise would have not via their local government. While many cry out the end of capitalism itself as a misused and abused world order, and the continuous debate on the impact of inequality and lack of diversity in social innovation, as well as a glimpse of what many call nationalistic specific protective measures, it is not foreseeable that large global corporations and some sort of shareholder system (with more or less government intervention) are going away. This is not meant as a defense of large corporations or of any of the tenants of capitalism and present social order, it is more a statement based on analysis and synthesis of what is known as future scenarios.

Large corporations will evolve, cycles of integration and disintegration, along with divestiture and mergers & acquisitions will continue to happen, this impacted by equally cyclical world crisis that tends to be plotted as expected by those that research and hypothesize on this topic. For each of these moments, for each of these stages in the cycle, there is a design reality, there is a design opportunity and a design possibility.

There will always be a difference between what some call start-ups and end-ups, it’s not about the value of one versus the other, they are both important to the economy and to social balance and there are plenty of studies on the impact of either an excess of one or the other in society. And design too is different in start-ups and end-ups, and comparing those needs is an exercise worthy of further research.