A vast increase in productivity, care of staggeringly swift advances in computing technology, drove the U.S. economy to new heights in the last 20 years. Where might the next surge in productivity come from to propel us out of the economic rut we are in now? Which companies or universities are at the cutting edge?

This was a question posed to me by Forbes as a part of their “America’s Most Promising Companies” series. Let me try to conjure up an answer.

Technology in and of itself is not the answer, it never has been, and this is coming from a card carrying technologist.

The problem with technology is that it inherently lacks context, something that is required when dealing with a social problem like the economy. No matter how many new social platforms we generate, how many advances in machine intelligence we create and how many new publishing and authoring tools we develop, we won’t get anywhere without that context.

What type of context am I talking about? To understand the answer to that, you need to first understand how I believe the economy will recover.

I will swear up and down that the strongest economic surge will begin exactly where all economic surges begin, at the doorstep of the small business owner. As work becomes increasingly scarce and an entire generation of students graduates from college with nothing to do and no where to go, many of them will start to look to entrepreneurship as their last, best hope at making something out of the $100k their parents put down for college.

This is an old story, a story repeated just about every time the economy turns south.

Where things start to look different is when you look at where these businesses will be started. Take this for example, I Wear Your Shirt. This isn’t a nightclub or a clothing store. It’s not even a shop on eBay or Amazon. What you have here is a personality driven, social media powered advertising play. You take an interesting person, a couple of different communication platforms (uStream and Twitter), advertisers who are starving for anything that looks like customer engagement and what you get is a viable business model. If you wander the halls of social technology long enough you’ll see more and more clever stunts turned business, you’ll see people taking cold, formless technologies and adding . . .

Context.

Back to the where we started, the question.

What companies do I think are going to drive us out of this economic stall? What technologies do I think will enable them?

I think we need to stop looking at problems like these in terms of companies and instead pay more attention to people and the platforms they can create. Individuals can now reach out and touch tens of thousands of people, these individuals have tastes and opinions, passions and products that they can talk about directly to those who might want to buy them. These same individuals have access to technologies that allow them to author, produce, edit and compile almost anything their hearts desire for a fraction of the cost they would pay at any other point in history. They can be marketer, salespeople and manufacturer all from the comfort of their armchairs.

As they find their voice, it’s these individuals that will become the machinery that fuels economic growth.

As they grow up and get better at what they do and grow into the technologies that they are using, they will become the force that drives the system forward.

The future, or at least a big piece of it, will be less about companies and technologies (which will become as transparent to us as the air we breath) but about people, platforms and context.

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