Conceptual Age: real or hype?

Software startups can run circles around big companies because of their agility and their ability to follow best practices as opposed to standard practices. What are a startup's biggest advantages in the conceptual age?

Is sensemaking purely a service industry, or will there be a thriving product market?

What is the sustainable competitive advantage in a startup that revolves around sensemaking?

I certainly believe it is real. It would be nice however if computer science education and research would have more to do with this conceptual age.

Agreed. The study of IT traditionally ends at data. Brad Burnham actually has a really amazing post about this:

http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2007/01/whats_next.html

This is a great article (excerpt, actually) -- thanks.

Creativity over competence. This is what separates simple programmers from software engineers.

"Yes, there are programming techniques to be learned, and there are tricks to help you keep a large software project on its rails. Unit testing, computational complexity, all these things are very important. But saying that software projects fail for lack of engineering is like saying that the latest Stephen King's novel is boring because he forgot to draw a UML diagram of the book." http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2007/02/04/why-building-software-is-hard/