The Next Economic Paradigm

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An Accounting System for Knowledge Assets

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Summary:

Classical economics is built upon a scarcity model of supply and demand of physical assets. In the trade of knowledge assets, the transfer of knowledge to one party does not require the cessation of knowledge by the other. As a result, it is estimated that 80% of a modern economy is intangible simply because it is not measured in accordance with generally accepted accounting practices. New methods in Blockchain and AI allow us to measure new value assets into tangible existence. This article proposes an accounting system for the next economic paradigm.

When Bears and Bulls Collide

In conventional accounting practices, a positive entry in the asset column of a balance sheet must correspond to a negative entry in the debit column. However, Knowledge Assets (K-Assets), function differently. The transfer of K-Assets does not require deducting the asset from the previous owner. Consequently, K-Assets are abundant and necessitate a different form of accounting to correctly attribute the contributions of STEM practitioners on a balance sheet.

A Brave New GAAP:

The Innovation Bank by The Ingenesist Project,  provides the substrate for the production of K-Assets. This process is similar to how financial institutions facilitate the production of Capital Assets (C-Assets), but with distinct differences. Furthermore, the successful accounting system would facilitates the equitable exchange between of K-Assets and C Assets. The goal is to establish parity between these previously separate asset classes based on an universal risk-adjusted basis, rather than a scarce profit-adjusted basis.

Revolutionizing Technology Transfer

The Innovation Bank revolutionizes technology transfer by focusing on knowledge assets in their natural state – the mind of the practitioners – rather than a physical objects like machines, buildings, or processes that they may create. Although the end result is identical, this approach proves far more efficient.  

In the Innovation Bank, the K-Asset, is created when one practitioner makes a claim and another practitioner validates it on a decentralized database. As a reward, they each receive cryptographic tokens that can later be used to access system metadata or traded on an open exchange for business intelligence.  This dynamic “nano-credentialization” in aggregate, forms a means to measure economic potential.

A simple game with extraordinary implications.

The system operates autonomously, providing practitioners with incentives to generate new K-Assets. The rate at which they gain access to other practitioners depends on the quality and quantity of their own K-Asset production. Practitioners are driven to maximize token rewards and accumulate a personal transaction record consisting of successful claims and validations. Access to the database opens up more opportunities for them to generate further claims and validations, creating a positive cycle of growth.

Digital Career Path

Individual transaction records essentially serve as a digital public key, representing a practitioner’s résumé, CV, or portfolio. The owner maintains full control over this record. To ensure integrity, the same game mechanics that populate the Innovation Bank discourage trivial, false, inaccurate, and malicious transactions. The ledger is immutable, auditable, and incorruptible, providing a robust system that prevents such fraudulent or malicious behavior.

The Economy of the Future

In this brave new world of accounting, where knowledge assets are valued on their intrinsic merit rather than their scarcity, the Innovation Bank represents a significant step forward. By embracing this new accounting paradigm, we can unlock the full potential of human knowledge, foster innovation, and create a more inclusive and sustainable economy for the future. Imagine the world that humanity can build for itself if the other 80% of economic growth could be measured into tangible existence.

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Gyroscopic Effects And The Tangibility of Intangibles

Countless examples abound where the forces of INTANGIBLE assets align is ways that allows them to detach from their shackles and float like a gyroscope. Invisible internal forces allow new social entities to organize, travel, produce, and consume seemingly without structure or anchors. Yet they influence the most tangible of assets in their path.

Next Economic Paradigm

The next step is to harness this social energy toward sustainable productivity.  Then, and only, then can we arrive at the new economic paradigm (albeit one that may be largely unrecognizable from what we know of today).

The United States has a skills crisis

Millions of smart, motivated, and skilled people are out of work. Meanwhile companies complain that they cannot find the skills that they need to fill open positions.  Predictably, the arguments rage polarized; companies are unwilling to train, the education system is unwilling to teach, etc.  But I don’t think that is the problem.

A Function of Time

The lag time in the traditional competitive cycle remained the same; measured in months for a marketing campaign, or years with a product development cycle, or even decades as with an aircraft program.  Government is also slow to act with election cycles, public debate, and assorted diversions. Likewise, education system curricula can take 3 to 5 years to go through the release process.

Like car crashes, bubbles pop when the system is too slow to respond.

Meanwhile machine enabled social technology is developing so fast that companies do not have time to respond in competitive manner.  Everything becomes a bubble as companies find themselves playing in a game that can crush them at any moment by any number of forces; financial, economic, political, regulatory, public relations, wiki leaks, Facebook, YouTube, Smart Phones, etc.  Even strategic partnerships can unnecessarily and irrevocably tie an institution to the possible misfortunes of associates, with no prior predictability or analysis – until it is too late.

The Tangibility Of Tangibles

The corporate structure that is supposed to be the MOST TANGIBLE assets that an institution can hold is what effectively nails them to the floor.  The bottom line is exactly that, the bottom of the value barrel.  Companies that cannot see past the bottom line, can only see the bottom – and that is where they are staffing today.

The Value Game

Although developed independently, The Value Game (described herehere, and here) resembles a form of Michael E Porter’s 5 forces of corporate competition – except moving at hyper-speed to generate internal forces like a gyroscope.  Players have neither the time nor the incentive to compete with each other, rather, they compete with a game that produces both tangible and intangible assets in a common accounting system creating new value at an astonishing speed.

Of course, the corporation will not disappear any more than industrial revolution eliminated the agrarians. However, you can bet that the differences will be equally profound.

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The New Economy Movement

The following 7 minute talk was presented at the Innotribe Sessions at SIBOS 2011 conference in Toronto Canada.

Here I identify a serious omission in our form of economics which may  inhibit the ability for currency to represent the things that people do and make. I also introduce how a new class of financial instruments could re-connect currency with productivity thereby reintroducing vast amounts of value into the tradable asset (currency) pool.

What if the solution to the great complexity of economic collapse is actually fairly simple – and we don’t find it?  What if the new economy is going to happen whether we want it to or not – and we are not prepared?  What if the tipping point to the New Economy is already past – and we are not in the game?

The only ones to blame would be ourselves for not building the obvious.

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Watching The Birds Play The Value Game

To some entrepreneurs, the problems with the aviation industries signal many insurmountable obstacles.  At  Social Flights these challenges portend an extraordinary opportunity for a new business method to bring efficiency, order, social value while eliminating artificial barriers.

Social Flights value proposition is very strong for travel ranging from 200-1000 miles between smaller airports. Social Flights can deploy quickly in response to specialized market needs, environmental condition, opportunities, or events. Social flights adapts the mission of the aircraft to meet the opportunities presented to the market.

Conversely, commercial aviation struggles dearly in this segment because they try to get the market to meet the pre-ordained mission of the aircraft. The entire air transportation system would be best served if commercial aviation concentrated on the long haul/high volume “migration” service.  There is no reason why private aviation cannot perform the job that gridlocks commercial aviation.  This would make both industries more efficient.

Commercial Aviation’s Race to Nowhere

The Deregulation Act of 1978 in the Commercial Aviation system led to the development of the Hub and Spoke system whereas commercial carriers would fly people from small locations into a one or more large “Hub” cities where they would transfer on to the next destination – usually another hub, or on to the final destination.

Deregulation undermined point-to-point service regardless of market demand, ignoring social objectives of the passengers, having no regard for the final destination of the passengers, and blowing off the “time-value” of their passengers.  Recently, the ever expanding security layer has reached the point of personal privacy invasion.  With the age of the Internet, sites such as Travelocity and Expedia diluted the “service class” market segmentation of the airlines in favor of the “price class” segmentation of airlines.  These forces caused the commercial airline experience to become a deceptive, deeply invasive, and physically strenuous experience.

Private Aviation’s starvation diet

Meanwhile, the private aviation sector has fallen under the thumb of listing agents who tie up the industry behind the gilded walls of Charter Brokerage Houses.  FAA regulation hampers the ability to attract passengers on a per-seat basis, which gives private operators a hugely limited marketing position.  Brokers took over to mark-up the price of chartered flights far beyond the reaches of a mainstream market.

For these reasons, the private aviation sector has had difficulty organizing itself into a self-sustaining cooperative, until now.  In Fact, the smaller the airplane and the more widely distributed the airports, the simpler and more efficient the whole social system can become.

Social Flights changes the Game by Changing the Mission.

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Ideas Travel Where People Travel

Good ideas travel easily and far along trade routes.  Ideas like irrigation, Apples, grapes and wine spread along the Silk Road. The paper and writing spread new ideas leading to increased literacy, the scrapping of old philosophy and the creation of new social orders. The printing press then led the way for today’s mighty publishing Industry.  But don’t forget a simple fact, travel is the substrate of the next economic paradigm.

Ideas: A Chain with many Weak Links

Seth Godin wrote a wonderful article about the publishing industry called The Domino Effect.  He observes that:

1. The middlemen (bookstores) have too much power to limit shelf space.

2.Authors are separated from their readers and don’t have the data to contact them directly.

3. Pricing is based static, slow, and largely irrelevant of content or any form of supply and demand which is of little benefit to the reader or the author.

4. Ideas from books travel much farther and faster than the book itself which does not translate into book sales.

Mr. Godin’s point is that given how important books are, the Chain has many weak links between the author and the audience. Publishing is due for an extraordinary disruption and Seth is going to change it with The Domino Project.  But how many other industries suffer from the same weak-chain syndrome?

Travel: A Plane with many Weak Links

Well, if Books and Travel spreads ideas along the Silk Road, then they must have a lot of other things in common.  If we apply Seth’s observations to the commercial airlines:

1. We see that Airports and airlines have tremendous power to limit gates, times, and availability of routes.

2.  Airlines have no idea why they are carrying all those people around.

3. Pricing is static, segmented, slow, and has very little to do with the actual supply and demand for travel.

4. Travelers are transporting ideas which move faster and more broadly than the aircraft itself and which does not translate into more airline tickets sold.

Where ideas spread; value is created

What is so powerful about ideas?  Most innovation gurus discount raw “ideas” as the useless drivel of idle minds. “Show me the money, not the ideas”, they bark.  If ideas are not innovation, then what are they?  If Ideas are not valuable, then what are they?

The Travel Economy

Travel technologies and applications are being sold for incredible sums of money.  Every airline merger is big news and every geolocation application is huge business.  Travel data is a lightening rod for everything from pricing to privacy.  Social Media applications are getting that migration routes are an excellent marker for “value flow” and therefore, cash flow.  Airline Travel is still the most favored mode political disruption because the links in the economic chain are so weak.  Travel is serious business.

The “New Value” Integration:

Every industry with weak links between production and end use are candidates for disruption in the great integration. Any idea that can strengthen the link in the chain between origin and the destination of an idea is a product of the great integration.  The Social Value creation process and astonishing opportunity will happen at the weak links between origin and destination of any product or service.

***

(Editors note: The above post is #2 in a series [1][2][3][4][5] introducing The Value Game to a new class of business methods.  The first real world application is Social Flights; a collaborative production / consumption game being deployed to the market.  If this works, the new business method class will be generalized throughout the economy to catalyze the convertibility of social currency.  Please join us at The Future of Money and Technology Summit in San Francisco on february 28th 2011 where we will unveil the work to the technology community)

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The 3 Steps To Social Profits

I have been approached by many brilliant social entrepreneurs in recent weeks.  They each have several things in common. Each has an incredibly creative idea and a strong passion linked to a deep seated observation that social currency has value.  As nebulous as that may sound, it is very real, specific, and clear in the minds of those who I’ll call, The New Entrepreneur.

Nothing Economic can happen until two or more people get together to build something.  Likewise, when two or more people get together to build something, economic things happen. The objective of this post is to demonstrate the 3 underlying actions of a new class of business plans that will become dominant in the next economic paradigm.

Our recipe is simple:

Step one: convert financial currency into social currency

Step two: Create value denominated in social currency

Step three: Convert new social currency back into financial currency – if needed

This simple recipe forms the basis of the business plans for several start-ups including Social Flights and The Social Value Network as well as numerous other projects that we consult to in the US, Greece, Brazil, Australia, China, and Mexico.

So here is how it works

The Old Business Model:  Suppose you buy a truck and you use it to haul stuff for your own personal and business interests. After 5 years, you can sell the truck for about 1/2 what you paid for it.

The New Business Model: Suppose that you buy a truck to hauls stuff for your own personal or business interests.  Suppose that you also let The Boy Scout troop leader borrow it to pick up christmas trees for sale.  Suppose you let the Kiwanis use it to pick up supplies for their annual salmon bake.  Suppose you let the YWCA haul donated furniture to their satellite facility.  Suppose you help your neighbor use it for a home improvement project.  After 5 years, you sell the truck for about 1/2 of what you paid for it.

The difference is that now your community is engaged with your personal interests.  You have converted financial capital into social capital and created new value denominated in social currency.  One notable example includes Neighborgoods, but there will undoubtedly be thousands of variations of this leveraging every conceivable physical asset.

Now, how do you transform this back social capital into financial capital?   Well, that’s what the emerging science of Social Capitalism is all about.  Social Profit is like a fungible option with a face value.  If structured correctly, an option can have a face value equal to the difference between discount and full price. That face value can be traded like money.  When you are engaged in a community, people know who you are, they trust you and they share with you.  People are trading options – the right without the obligation to exercise a financial position in the future.

Options have real value as an asset if you have them or as a liability if you don’t

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A Tale As Old As Time

by animeartist67

Nothing grabs people’s attention these days like a discussion about the future of money.  Yet few subjects diverge as wildly. The stakes are high since personal and political fortunes are cast against the ideals of what money is, what it has been, and what it will become.  The temptation to cast the future of money in one’s own image is a tale as old as time and likely the source of most social conflict.

The Future of Time

There are two futures of money being foretold today. One is predicated on the demise of Capitalism and persistent denial that scarcity is a real economic element, despite the obvious scarcity of time in one’s life, for instance. The other future seeks to correct the flaw in Market Capitalism so that one’s scarce time may become more equitably allocated and less easily exploited by others.  Social values such as freedom, liberty, family, community, trust, health and welfare are derived from how one is allowed to prioritizes their own time, not how one is able to prioritizes the time of others.

The United States of Mind

The reason why this distinction is important is that no great economic paradigm of human civilization ever came about as a result of wholesale collapse of the prior economic paradigm. Rather, each new state of human social organization was derived from the prior state through an integration of tools created in that prior state.

It is now time to take account of these tools and figure out how to integrate them correctly.  This is the only way to foresee where we need to go and how we can get there.  The only way to defeat gravity is to understand gravity. The work will be difficult, it will be scientific, it will be intellectually challenging, and it will be inclusive of all living systems – including those that we seek to change. The trick to the future of money business will be to cure the disease without killing the patient.

Unfortunately, we may not have much time

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80/20 Rule: The Value of Human Interaction

If an IPod is shuffling in the forest, and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

This is a standard philosophical riddle that raises questions regarding observation and knowledge of reality. Alexander T. Jackson, one of the great minds of the 20th century, may have said that, “View points of this riddle differ based on the perceived definition of the word ‘sound’, often confused with the definition of the word ‘hearing’.”

A $300 Ipod is shuffling in the forest and nobody is around to interact with it, does it have value?

This philosophical riddle also raises questions regarding observations and knowledge of reality.  Viewpoints in this riddle differ based on the perceived definition of the word ‘money’, often confused with the definition of the word ‘value’.

To this question, Wall Street would say “Yes”, but Main Street would say “No”. In fact this brings into question the order of how we assign value in our world.

Suppose we constructed the same riddle for any physical asset such as a bridge, house, airplane, computer, car, university education, insurance policy, Marketing Department, tennis shoe, police officer, trumpet, leaf blower, FaceBook, Twitter, Linked In, fungus cream, guacamole, anything at WalMart, etc…..

Value of human interaction

Before long, we notice that the value of nearly all products and services is wholly derived from the value of human interaction with the object.  So where exactly is the true value of our economy, in the object or in the human interaction?   Wall Street would say “object”, but Main Street would say “human interaction”.

Credit Score

In finance, the credit score was established to assess the human interaction with a financial instrument called debt.  Yet, in the above example it is relatively clear that the vast majority of value created is dependent on human interaction with products and services that may or may not be financed with debt, not the debt itself.  It would seem that a social credit score and a knowledge inventory would be more appropriate way to assess the true value of economic activity. But where do we start establishing such an index?

The Social Value Index

We’ll start with a baseline 80/20 rule first identified by an Italian Economist named Vilfredo Pareto.  In our rendition, 80% of the true economy is created in the form of social value and 20% is created in the form of financial value.  Keep in mind that Dr. Pareto also defined a concept called the “Pareto Efficiency” for social resource allocation. This refers to the end-state of an economic game where no player can become better off without also making at least one other player worse off.

The objective then, is to design Social Value Games that are 80/20 (social vs. financial leverage) compliant and Pareto Efficient then, test the hypothesis and improve it toward optimality.

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The Social Value Game

The Social Value Game

The value game is a social media business method developed by the folks at The Ingenesist Project in a dynamic application of social technology.

Most applications of game theory are controlled from in-house or deployed against a competitive landscape.  The Value Game is deployed external to the corporation and in a cooperative landscape where rewards are given to those who organize people around a “highly leveraged product” in valuable ways.

There are 5 elements to The Value Game

The first is what we call a highly leveraged product such as a conference, experience, convenience, ZipCars, or reunion – we’ll see that almost any product can be leveraged.

The next element is a secondary product vendor such as a hotel, restaurant, transportation, clothing, or equipment supplier – we’ll also see how almost any product can be deployed in the secondary role.

The third element is a consumer who seeks to minimize financial cost and maximize social value.

The fourth element is a 3rd party entrepreneur who is able to organized people in social networks and leverage primary and secondary assets in unique combinations.

The fifth Element is a true value calculator called the Social Value Index (SVI).   The SVI is the scorekeeper that calculates the actual value of the leveraged product after all of the discounts and social value factors are counted.

The game starts when everyone joins the same social network underwritten by a mobile electronic debit card platform and sets their filters for what information can enter (and to block out spam).  The highly leveraged product in the middle acts like a ball in play whose value is dependent on the interaction of the other elements.  Secondary vendors will deploy incentives into the field.  Third party entrepreneurs will organize people around the incentives and take social profits.  The Social Value Index will keep score.

Example 1: A ZipCar costs about 8 dollars per hour; this business model does not encourage social activity; it encourages fast shopping. Suppose that a person pays for the ZipCar on their debit card.  Local restaurants will be made aware of the purchase and then deploy coupons against the ZipCar to the buyer’s debit card. Next, a 3rd party entrepreneurs may improve the SVI by organizing a ZipCar swap so that the person does not have to leave in the same ZipCar that they arrived in and can spend more time shopping.  Another entrepreneur may organize events for families and friends that increase the passengers in each ZipCar, or by capturing any inventory from the community such as movie tickets or family experiences to deploy against the ZipCar.  After the event, the SVI updates the net cost of the ZipCar from 8 dollars per hour to, say, 1.42 per hour.  This is 80% savings on the ZipCar and 33% savings on a day out with the family over using their own car.

In effect, the leveraged product buys itself in a convertible social currency

Example 2: Suppose that a popular aerobics instructor has 40 students.  The local health food store may authorize her to give away 1000 coupons for 5% discount on store products.  In return, the aerobics instructor gets 5% of total purchased.  The health food store already spends 10% of revenue on advertising. It is in the instructor’s best interest to give the coupons to people who are likely to spend the most at the store.  After all, if 1000 people spend 100 dollars each, she stands to gain 5000 dollars.  The health food store stands to gain loyal customers without advertising. The aerobics instructor may maximize her profits by joining with a health food chef to teach classes in healthy cooking.  Or, she may join with a caterer, wedding planner, or hotel to supply an entire event for which she will receive social and financial value.  She may give them to colleagues who also become authorized to give away coupons – and she negotiates for a percentage of their output as well. She will become knowledgeable about the products at the store and talk about them with her friends.  She may even sell the face value of the coupons for cash since it is likely that a high bidder would also be a large customer for the health food store.  The Social Value Index favors this store, this aerobics instructor, and this social network – higher than competitors.  SVI registers with Search Engines and bargain hunters seek the Aerobics Instructor for deeper information and services.

Millions of applications will arise limited only by the imagination of communities not Wall Street

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American Day Dreams

As we discuss many times in this blog; human knowledge assets include combinations of intellectual capital, social capital, and creative capital. Of course nobody can survive without all of these elements, however, I am continuously amazed at the power of the last and most important element; Creative Capital.

This video is from an extraordinary Seattle Musician named Aaron English. I have known Aaron for several years and follow all of his work. He is always up to something completely interesting. Aaron can say more in 4 minutes that I can say in 100 blog posts.

Artists and musicians have what I call “communication density”. They are the true innovators among us.  They can combine so many different concepts, media forms, and objects to produce something completely new and interesting. Artists create value. I rely heavily on the artists for my day dreams.

Please enjoy this video – American Day Dreams. Watch it several times. Don’t forget to daydream

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Tattle-Tale Economics

Editorialized Economics

Social media used to be so cool – a way to bypass the mediated reality of editorialized content. Real people coming back with real ideas and real opportunities from the crystal clear waters of cooperative community. Then legacy media and their ad-rev departments started to wonder “Hey, where did everyone go?” Marketer started saying, “Hey, these CPM numbers are F***ed – something is cutting into our pie ?!?!?”

Then came the Social Media Gurus

like the tattle-tale kid brother intent on spoiling a perfectly good game of hide and seek, screeching: “There they are, there they are!!!….Can you see ’em?…see, see, your customers are hiding in the shadows… there, in the shadows….quick!!! Can you see ’em now?.  By the way, pay my fee, buy my book, and did I mention my latest ‘keynote’ yet?”

Next, the Gurus went mainstream as legacy media analysts!! Legacy media picked up the ball on the run-away ad spend. They glossed poetic on the “effects” but not the “causes” of social media. And, OH Gawd, what a nuisance all those pesky bloggers are to the dignified art and science of professional journalism.

A Monster was Born

Facebook declared that people really want to share their personal details with the world, and a monster was born. So now we are stuck with Corporate Media on steroids.  Your data are scraped so they can find you. Images are reproduced infinitely. Lies and deception grow legs half way around the world before the truth can even be awakened from it’s slumber. Say one thing wrong and it haunts you forever.

Casualty or Causality

Social Media has become another casualty of the broken financial system where people fight for artificial scarcity.  It is no longer a means to empower and enlighten, it is becoming another means to exploit and oppress.   Special recognition goes out to all the so-called social media gurus. I can’t blame them though, everyone has the right to make an honest living.

Call it tattle-tale economics

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Of Anxiety and Optimism

Keep it Simple

I’ll keep this simple because it is simple.  Most people know exactly what I am talking about.  Most people feel that a huge change is underway.  Most people feel deep in their hearts that whatever we are doing today will be different tomorrow.  Most people feel a strange combination of anxiety and optimism.

It’s Time to Change

No, it’s not just a political change or an economic change or even a social change.  All of these, in their simplicity, would not do justice to the magnitude of what is really about to happen.  The forces now in play will resolve to the equivalent difference between the hunter gatherer civilization, and the Renaissance.   The next economic paradigm will be as different as the abacus is from the computer itself.  Yet, the process by which this is happening is so simple, that the mind is repelled.

Factors of Production

In the Industrial revolution, a machine would make widgets.  It did not matter whether you or I ran the machine, the same widget would emerge.

Today, the machine is a computer.  Your interaction with the computer is entirely different than my interaction with the computer.  In fact, you could swap out the computers and our individual output would remain unchanged.

A HUGE difference

Factors of production are no longer the land, labor, and financial capital of Classical Economic theory.  The factors of production are social, creative, and intellectual capital of  people and their communities.

Classical economic theory is breaking down.  There is a huge change on the horizon. The new economic paradigm is in the process of siphoning off the old economic paradigm.  We’re approaching mid-span; both tanks are half empty or half full, depending on how you look at it.

Confidence is a mixture of anxiety and optimism

I can say with great confidence that anxiety and optimism are the correct emotions to be experiencing today.  So go ahead and tell the children in your life that everything will be OK.

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Outsourcing Fail

Gambling with Jobs

The US Senate recently blocked a measure designed to reduce the outsourcing of US jobs that many corporations pursue in the relentless drive to reduce costs.

Modern Globalization is a system

Globalization must be analyzed like a system. Data, Information, knowledge, Innovation, and wisdom are profoundly related in a system. If you take away one of the components, the others become worthless.  If you destroy one component, the entire structure could fail.

Everyone knows that data, information, knowledge, innovation, and wisdom are related.  If I corrupt the data, then the associated information, knowledge, innovation, and wisdom are also corrupted.  Likewise, if I eliminate any of these elements, the system fails.

Focus on Core competency – what core?

The standard argument for outsourcing is that knowledge workers are better allocated in innovation jobs so “we can better focus on our core – and heck, we can all save a little dough in the process”.  But when we outsource our knowledge economy, the innovation economy is choked off.    The knowledge economy is the source of the Innovation Economy.  The Knowledge economy is also the recipient of the information economy which transforms data and information into useful tools, ideas, and products.

Rate Of Change is Innovation

The rate of change of the innovation economy is directly proportional to the INCREASE not the OUTSOURCING of the knowledge economy.  This is the calculus of outsourcing.  If, on the other hand, it is in you best interest to keep a population poor, weak, and unable to organize into powerful collectives, then yes, outsourcing is an effective method.

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The Innovation Banker

Future of Banking

When I use the term “Innovation Bank”, people conjure up the image of a cheery place where anticipation reigns as starry eyed depositors arrange their intellectual property in neat cubby boxes, Patents fly like cash register receipts and companies troll the halls looking for a cure for their bottom line blues.

This is not exactly what we have in mind, nor is it too far off either. An innovation Bank is simply a knowledge inventory that contains knowledge assets that exists in the format of a financial instrument and can be deployed for the purposes of increasing productivity.  In the process, it makes 10X more of itself every time it is deployed.  It mints its own money.

The Innovation Banker

This is not much different than a financial bank. In fact, in the financial bank, everyone assumes the borrower has the knowledge to execute the business plan and the bank lends the money. Oh, by the way, the money makes more of itself  10X over (fractional reserve system) every time it is deployed.

With the innovation bank, everyone assumes the entrepreneur has the money to execute the plan, and the seek to borrow the knowledge. Other than that, they can be considered identical. The key is in the scope, depth, and format in which the knowledge assets live in a community as well as the ability to track and preserve the creation of new knowledge in a community.  An innovation banker is a knowledge banker

A Virtuous Circle

Together with the financial banking, these two system engage in the dance of the virtuous circle of innovation enterprise. Apart, they collapse into the swirling cesspool of eternal debt and infinite interest (pun intended).

Ingenesist.com

Music by Phil Felicia

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Calculus for Dummies and Capitalists

Mathematics Dysfunction Disorder

I am continuously astonished at the reactions I get from people every time I make a reference to mathematics, especially Calculus. Most people politely glaze their eyes over and stare at an inanimate object somewhere behind my head. Others launch into a diatribe of how the linear thinkers destroyed the world in the first place. Others will simply say, “I have [insert Deficit Dysfunction Disorder here]”

Puzzled by Limits?  Perplexed by derivatives?

The truth of the matter is that everyone already knows Calculus, they solve differential equations all day long – they just don’t know that they already know what I’m talking about.  If you take away all the strange terms, squiggly lines, and alphabet soup notation,….

Calculus is astonishingly simple


  • The Banker does not care about money, he cares about the rate of change of money.
  • The Stock Market does not care about risk, it cares about the rate of change of risk
  • The Politician does not care about votes, they care about the rate of change in votes
  • The Meteorologist does not care about weather, she cares about the rate of change in weather
  • The Pilot does not care about lift, they care about the rate of change of lift
  • The Gymnast does not care about motion, she cares about the rate of change of motion
  • The Artist does not care about color, he cares about the rate of change of color
  • The Doctor does not care about your health, she cares about the rate of change in your health
  • The Baker does not care about dough, they care about the rate of change of dough
  • The Farmer does not care about crops, he cares about the rate of change of crops
  • The Scientists does not care about data, they care about the rate of change of data
  • Google does not care about information, it cares about the rate of change of information
  • Entrepreneurs do not care about knowledge, they care about the rate of change of knowledge
  • Markets do not care about innovation, they care about the rate of change of innovation
  • Our children do not care about our wisdom, they care about our rate of change of wisdom

When people can learn how to understand what they are really doing in instead of what they think they are doing, then and only then, will we be able to see, and subsequently, build the next economic paradigm.  That is why I use mathematics and that is when Social Media Becomes a Science

The Capitalist does not care about value, they care about the rate of change of value

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Sell-ebrity Sects

Waiting in the grocery store checkout line, there is never a shortage of glossy media about the sex lives of Celebrities. The stories are always the same, only the Celebrities change.

There are no glossy tabloids in the DIY check-out line where the objective is to check you out as fast as possible in order to meet a competitive “service quota”. In either case, however, the consumer is being extorted of value.

A sect is a group with distinctive religious, political or philosophical beliefs. In modern culture the term can refer to any organization that breaks away from a larger one to follow a different set of rules and principles. A sellebrity is someone who sells distraction for a living – they may talk about something that sounds like productivity, but it is really a distraction designed to maintain a status quo.

When marketers want you to do the same thing over and over again, you get Sellebrity Sects.  When marketers want you to change your behavior, they remove the Sellebrity sects.  The absence of sellebrities is equally interesting, and somewhat counter intuitive.   Yet, consumers think it is the exact opposite.  In either case, the consumer is extorted of value.

Sellebrity Sects refers to a set of rules or principles set out as different from the rest and used for the specific purpose of liberating you from your values; your time value, social values, financial values, even your family values.

Social media is introducing a host of new Sellebrities peddling some object designed to fortify their credibility, usually a book tour, keynote address, “Reputation”, social currency, or an A-list client. The ‘pitchman’ preoccupies the consumer into standing still long enough to create an arbitrage position for those who can exploit the TIME that you are not acting – either for branding or automating. When the arbitrage position collapses, a new sect is formed and the game continues.

Keep in mind that “Value” exists in many different forms, the game is intense, Time is the currency, and the story never changes. Look at the sellebrities all around you. Ask yourself why they are there. Try to identify the sects. Guard your social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital very carefully – use it to increase your productivity alone.  Most of all, be different – they will either ignor you or pay you.

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An Economic Paradigm Breaks Down

Land, labor, and capital are no longer effective proxies for human productivity, creativity and intellect – end of story.  We need to stop talking about social media as if Monetization is some kind of mystery.

An Economic Paradigm Breaks Down

The road to monetization is not paved upon on the roadmap of the industrial revolution. Something new needs to happen, we’ve got to move on:

From Wikipedia:

Innovation economics is a growing economic theory that emphasizes entrepreneurship and innovation. Innovation economics is based on two fundamental tenets: that the central goal of economic policy should be to spur higher productivitythrough greater innovation, and that markets relying on input resources and price signals alone will not always be as effective in spurring higher productivity, and thereby economic growth.

This is in contrast to the two other conventional economic doctrines, neoclassical economics and Keynesian economics.

Theory:

Innovation economists believe that what primarily drives economic growth in today’s knowledge-based economy is not capital accumulation, as claimed by neoclassicalism asserts, but innovative capacity spurred by appropriable knowledge and technological externalities. Economics growth in innovation economics is the end-product of knowledge (tacit vs. codified); regimes and policies allowing for entrepreneurship and innovation (i.e., R&D expenditures, permits, licenses); technologicalspillovers and externalities between collaborative firms; and systems of innovation that create innovative environments (i.e., clusters, agglomerations, metropolitan areas).[2][3]

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The True Value Calculation

In case anyone is wondering if Social media can drive Social Priorities  against Wall Street Priorities, they need not look any further than the cover of the New York Times. Here is a story from the August 31st edition about banks that step away from no-brainer money making business venture because of the social risks to their reputations and therefore, their bottom line.

It is obvious that new sources of energy will be hugely lucrative in the future – except when blowing up pristine Appalachian mountain tops or releasing vast CO2 emissions cracking oil from Canadian sands – both perfectly legal enterprises.

In the past, the struggle between those in favor and those opposed to, say, a coal extraction project played out largely in private and was heavily biased toward those with the deepest pockets. In the past, the developers had an advantage of vast money reserves to wage legal battles, political wrangling, and public relations campaigns against the lowly community action members. Now, this fountain of money may dry up in the future if banks step away, politicians become wary, and the public becomes increasingly informed of the true value of all alternatives.

“We’re taking a much closer look at a much broader variety of issues, not all of which are captured under state and local laws,” said Stephanie Rico, a spokeswoman for the environmental affairs group at Wells Fargo.

These dynamics are converging on something called a “True Value” Calculation. The True Value Calculation is the expanded ROI of a business venture which includes the positive and negative impacts on a much wider body of stakeholders in the sum total of viability. In the very near future, we may find that the True Value Calculation will become the rational basis of our democracy as social media aspires to the role of social vetting mechanism and politicians become increasingly irrelevant to anyone but each other.

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Intellectual Property In the Cloud

The Patent system is slow, static, and expensive. Sure it’s great for corporations and wealthy institutions, but what about the rest of us? How do we get paid for our intellectual property? We make rapid fire decisions every day that can make or break markets – who’s got time to patent?

Intellectual Property In the Cloud

Or maybe the last thing that Wall Street wants is for Engineers, Architects, designers, and creative people to get “royalties” on their work. Wall Street is quite happy collecting the royalties of the creative people in America – those people who actually produce something real and tangible.  Social media is a social contract and Intellectual Property is our tangible currency. Hello.

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The Definition Of Innovation Must Change

Innovation is currently defined as “A new idea that has a favorable economic outcome”.  The problem is that nobody can solve one equation with two unknowns, i.e., what’s a new idea? and what’s the economic outcome?  By this definition, you can only identify innovation after it has occurred.  So, it’s not very useful – in fact, it is a tragic definition and it must be scrapped immediately.

The trick is to identify the new ideas and direct them to the appropriate economic outcome, not the other way around as many companies and agencies try to do.  Most good ideas can’t find a place to be profitable in a silo, so they are scrapped. This is not the fault of talent or the idea, but invariably both are lost.

The existing definition of innovation is insufficient for use as a way to identify innovation in the present. There is no way to build an innovation economy upon a flawed definition and unpredictable value of innovative activity. This new interpretation will allow innovation to properly behave like a financial instrument.

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An IPO For Humanity

The term IPO conjures images of empire-making where a hot young company with a great product offers pieces of its future-self for sale to the public as a means of raising money without incurring debt.  The money is then used to create the next titan whose new jolt of growth is shared with all who participated.

Today, every annual report to shareholders touts the great team of people whose social, creative, and intellectual capital make it all happen, the worthy and stoic investors whose vision drives sound decisions, and the legions of happy customers who make it all worthwhile.

Essentially, an IPO is people buying into the productivity of other people.

Yet, the IPO is a strict and complex legal and regulatory maneuver that establishes property rights on these small pieces of future productivity – represented by “stock” in the company.

There are underwriters (usually a bank), battalions of lawyers, the securities and exchanges commission (SEC), brokers, insurers, re-insurers, institutional investors, private investors, and retail investors.  There is a full infrastructure supporting the facts of incorporation, disclosure, accounting, and proper management of internal “inside” information.  And, of course, there is a media /PR campaign.  All are integrated to keep the game fair, yet viable.

In the Age of Social Media

I could be wrong but it seems that such vast infrastructure appears a bit awkward if the end result is simply for people to buy into the productivity of other people.  This happens everyday in Social Media.  At some point, we really need to ask; why can’t an individual or a group of individuals raise money without incurring debt like corporations can?

In Social Media, people own and deploy their relationships,  communities, motivation, their knowledge, creativity, intellect, mentorship, leadership, teamwork, their network, and even their ability to form corporations – people own their time.  Social currency is backed by the scarcity of time and the availability of surplus knowledge.

All of the structural components of the financial system are appearing in an analogous form in social media; social vetting, social gaming, aggregation, influence, knowledge inventories, communities of knowledge assets, local social, global social, tag search, deep search, semantic search, stream of consciousness search, geolocation, mobile computing, multi-media, and many more innovations are being created and deployed everyday which literally serve the functions of banks, lawyers and legislation in an invisible economy.

The Ingenesist Project tries to string this all together with just enough specificity so that an alternate financial system will jump start itself and become both visible and available to everyone.

We’ll hold an IPO for Humanity

All of the infrastructure and the potential for people to produce things would remain intact regardless of what happens to the currency.  Think about what would happen if all the dollar based money system evaporated. The only safe haven for the storage and exchange of value will be in people and their communities.

The only thing missing is a system that can articulate social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital instead of land labor and financial capital.  This system can be built today.

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The Last Mile: Social Media Battleground

Sure Bro…Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin are great for broadcasting across the Ocean, but how good are they for meeting your neighbors? As wonderful as all this global chatter appears, nothing tangible happens until the rubber meets the road.

Don’t Worry, Be Neighborly…

Nothing “Economic” can happen is Social Media until real people get together to build things. Sure, Marketers are trying their hardest to penetrate the last mile, but communities are trying to defend it too. This is the final battleground of Social Media. The end game must be as follows: Social priorities must ultimately drive Wall Street priorities – not the other way around. That is the only sustainable thesis for the next millennium.

The following video describes how the components of the next economic paradigm must act locally, but share globally. For anyone wondering what to do next or where the great opportunities are, think about building out the Last mile of Social Media.

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Please Vote for The Ingenesist Project; SXSW

The Ingenesist Project has submitted the following presentation to the South By Southwest Conference in Austin Texas on March 2011. We sincerely encourage our readers to vote for this presentation. It promises to be hugely compelling, deeply controversial, and boldly disruptive. This is for a 60 minute solo presentation to the Advanced Technical Track – the competition is impressive. Voting ends Friday August 27, 2010

Please select the following link to vote

Thank you very much for your support

The Ingenesist Project

Description:

Today, we have one of the most extraordinary opportunities in human history playing out before our eyes. Social Capitalism is no longer merely a band-aid for an amoral Market Capitalism, it is a new form of Capitalism in it’s own right.

In the age of social media, many entrepreneurs no longer allocate land, labor, and financial capital as a primary means of production. Rather, they deploy social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital to the production of a vast amount of “value” that is stored and exchanged in communities. The objective of The Ingenesist Project is to make this value tangible outside the constructs of government and corporate interaction.

This presentation identifies the five essential components of Market Capitalism and demonstrates similar elements emerging in social media. It then specifies how these elements can be integrated to perform the essential analogous functions of financial institutions. Next, we specify three relatively simple social media applications that may create a new class of business plans enabling millions of social entrepreneurs worldwide. Finally, a new financial instrument is described which can be capitalized and securitized to form the basis of a fungible social currency to hedge the dollar.

The net result could create a condition where Wall Street priorities are subservient to social priorities rather than social priorities being subservient to Wall Street priorities.

Questions Answered


What can replace market capitalism when it finally runs out of steam?
What exactly are people producing when they engage in Social Media and why does it create value?
What characteristics must a social currency have in order to be fully convertible or even a replacement for the dollar?
What is a knowledge inventory, how should it be formed, and why should every community have one?
What would be a powerful strategic plan for the Internet in the absence of one today?


[Level Advanced Category Entrepreneurism / Monetization Tags monetization, Social Capitalism, Social Currency Type Solo Event Interactive 2011]

The presentation will mirror some content found in the following video series

Photo credit:


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Social Capitalism and The Innovation Bond

We know the Venture Capitalists look for returns of 1000% on their investments. We also know that Corporate innovation (as reflected by the S&P 500) enjoys a long term median return rate of about 9-10%

It follows to reason that all of the innovation that could return somewhere between 10% and 1000% goes largely un-capitalized. This does not mean that the innovation does not exist – it only means that it is invisible to any existing financial system, it is accounted as “intangible” – or worse, it shows up as a liability.

Parents caring for children, Children caring for elderly parents, Mentors educating proteges, groups of people organizing, sharing knowledge, and growing families – all increase the net productivity of society. Legions of people creating options and opportunities for themselves and each other in communities, social media, and extended networks – all increase the value stored in communities.   Billions of people-hours inventing better ways to do the things that they do, compensating for the shortcomings of governments and corporations – all of this innovation falls into the range between 10% and 1000% ROI, yet, remains invisible and un-capitalized.

Social media as a whole is growing at well over 200% per year where every single interaction creates incremental multiples of social value – otherwise people would not do it (to say that people are irrational is to say that markets are irrational).  Where is all that value going?  Meanwhile, in the current Global financial debt crisis, institutions that hold huge amounts of cash are scouring the globe for pockets of low-risk productivity as sanctuary from volatile financial markets.

Now, suppose that an innovation bond were to come along which produces a risk adjusted return of, say, 15%. This means that human productivity is being reliably increased somewhere in a community by only 15% per year. If this were the case across a broad sector of inter-related communities where productivity were denominated in a fungible currency, investors would seek refuge in the Innovation Bond.  If the Innovation Bond returned say, 20% or more – all the money in the world may drop the debt based currency in favor of the innovation based currency by seeking refuge in innovation bonds.  Yes, I said it – “all the money in the world”.  Now, get over it.

Proceeds would be distributed to organized communities whose knowledge inventory is formatted like a financial instrument in the form of entrepreneurship. Proceeds would go to communities where the probability of success is known long before the bets are made in the form of Cheap Venture Capital. Proceeds would go to communities where productivity is defined by an un-corruptible algorithm through decreased volatility coefficients. Proceeds would go to communities where assets are valued accurately by true supply and true demand.  Proceeds would go to less developed communities with the highest social arbitrage potential rather than those with the most powerful marketers and lobbyists.  Most importantly, money would go to corporations that adopt the innovation economy. The stronger the institutions of Social Capital become, the greater the value of an innovation bond.  New production of goods and services would reflect these social priorities in the True Value Game.

In effect, Social Priorities will drive Wall Street priorities instead of Wall Street priorities driving Social Priorities – that is Social Capitalism

In the future, there will be only one sustainable investment left – people, communities, and their natural willingness and ability to be productive with their time. The rest is history.

***

Material based on video series here

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The Next Google

Everyone wants to know what “The Next Google” is.  From WIKiD Tools, the answer should be obvious:  Google is an information company.  Their stated objective is to organize the World’s information.  The next element up the human development ladder from the Information Economics rung is Knowledge Economics rung. Therefore, the next “Google” will deploy technology that can organize the World’s knowledge.

A State of Mind

Unfortunately, knowledge can only exist inside the minds of people, so consequently, “The Next Google” must also engage in the messy task of organizing the World’s people as well as the knowledge contained in each one of them.  Not an easy task in dog-eat-dog Global Market Capitalism.

The Facebookie

At first, it seems that Facebook may be converging on this – they are certainly trying.  The problem with Facebook’s approach is that they continue to  insist that Market Capitalism is valid (obviously preparing for the killer IPO) when they should be pioneering the hedge fund called “Social Capitalism”.  Facebook continues to bank on the suggestion that people really really want to share  their personal details and will tolerate invasion by armies of anonymous data miners in order to do so.  Facebook’s best shot may be for one of their gaming currencies to become a black market currency so that when the dollar collapses,  people would gladly sell their privacy in exchange for food.

Since a gaming currency can only be created by people performing frivolous tasks, at best, gaming currencies – phenomenal growth or not – are no more robust than the dollars it seeks to displace.   Sustainability? Uh, no.

Anonymity rules

Think about it this way.  Real human productivity is stored in a dollar bill; otherwise nobody would “work” for it.  The recipient does not know or care if the dollar bill was last used by someone to buy cigarettes or Girl Scout cookies.   The dollar bill is completely anonymous.  Likewise, value is stored in the brains of every living person – there is no need to know who they are until the transaction is exercised and profits are distributed.  Everything else is unnecessary invasion of privacy and certainly not something to build a currency around let alone the next economic paradigm.  The Next Google will treat people like the currency, not ‘like’ the Girls Scout Cookies.

The “Next Google” will be a percentile search engine that will return odds – or probabilities – based on an anonymized public knowledge inventory. Search results will predict the likelihood that any combination of knowledge assets can produce or execute any combination of products or services at a known cost based on the supply and demand for those known knowledge assets.  End of mystery.

Everyone can now make their bets and play their games with real productivity because, in effect, the percentile search engine will match most worthy knowledge deficit with most worthy knowledge surplus and throw the rest of it in the trash bin.

The only thing people want to know is what they want to know, and nothing else.  Now that’s what real productivity is made of, that is what real money is made of.

Please Vote for The Ingenesist Project to present at SXSW 2011

The Ingenesist Project specifies an Innovation Economy built on a platform of social media as the next economic paradigm.  60 minute solo presentation in the advanced technical track.  Your help is deeply appreciated. All comments welcome.  Material based on video series here

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