Real-time economy is an environment where all the transactions between business entities are in digital format, increasingly generated automatically, and completed in real-time (as they occur) without store and forward processing. The real-time enterprise is a giant spreadsheet of sorts, in which new information, such as an order, is automatically processed and percolates through a firm's computer systems and those of its suppliers. The core objective of the real time economy is the reduction of latency between and within processes. Latency reduction will reduce capital occupancy costs by occupying assets (physical and labor) for less time.
The concept of Real-Time Economy was created and is under development by the University of Aalto in Finland.