The Next Economic Paradigm

Tag: Social Media

The Next Economic Paradigm; Part 3: Knowledge Inventory

Welcome back to the New Economic Paradigm Series.  The objective is to develop an innovation system that emulates the financial system.  In order to do this, we look for the social component that could best duplicate the function of the closest corresponding financial system component.

Part 2 discussed the currency of trade.  Part 3 will discuss the inventory of knowledge assets.

Most companies have an inventory of every nut, bolt, rivet, or panel that they need to build something tangible.  In innovation economy, we will need to have an inventory to assemble knowledge assets so that we can build something tangible and support the currency.

Your resume is like a book about you.  Conversely, every book that you have read has become part of your knowledge inventory.

Every experience you have had, every conversation you have participated in, every new idea that tried, successful of failed, is part of your knowledge inventory.  The things that you like to do, things that you do not like to do, and things that you do not know are part of this inventory and the way it is organized in your consciousness.

The Dewey Decimal System is a way to catalog information in books. Keep in mind that The Dewey System is archaic; however, it does provide us with some key insights:

From our earlier definition; to organize information is to organize a proxy for knowledge and innovation.

The decimal classification structure has a great advantage for the computer and mathematical analysis.  Additionally, tens of thousands of librarians are fluent and most people in the US have at least a minimal familiarity with it.

For a quick review, the body of written information is divided into 10 main categories.  Each main category is divided into 10 more categories and each of those are divided into 10 categories – and this can go on forever.

It is useful to note that the Dewey Decimal classification has a bias toward the three factors of production for the innovation economy; Social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital:

Most resume reading programs just pick up key words, so why have any other words?

Your resume can be a series of Dewey numbers instead of words and computers can tag the numbers as they do key words today. For example:

302, 307, 330, 607, 17, 500, 519

If your mind were a library and you attempted to map it all out, one would see that everything is related in some way – intuitively, this is what defines you. If we looked into your world, we would discover a huge network of experiences, books read, lessons learned, and people encountered.

We would find a system of knowledge rather than random facts that you have organized.  Your likes and dislikes would be reflected in what you do and do not want to do. Everyone is different – nobody is the same.  Everyone innovates, everyone has knowledge, and everyone shares information.

If we add some mathematical symbols and Boolean logic, perhaps we could capture the system of knowledge a little better. Your resume may now look like this:

{20,12};[302 AND 307], (330):[607 AND 17] OR [500/519]

Now need to make this look like money.  Before our knowledge can behave like a financial instrument we need to add one additional factor – the quality of the knowledge.

In American society there is a persistent ideology of winners and losers; there can only be one winner and the rest are losers.  We rank things in a very linear way; 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.  Our culture is to protect one’s position at all cost, shield away all attackers and decimate our competition.  This way of thinking was effective in the industrial economy, but today it keeps us from understanding how knowledge actually exists in a community.

We need to switch to a bell curve distribution for knowledge assets because it better reflects reality and eliminates unproductive competition; there are no winners or losers, just different markets.

There is a perfectly legitimate market for a Porsche as there is for a Toyota.

Statistical distributions are used extensively in finance to value financial instruments; we need to do the same now for our knowledge assets. To make financial sense out of our random world, we must classify knowledge assets on a bell curve.  Consider the following resume:

{20:95%,12:80%};[302 AND 330]70%:(607 AND 17)80% OR [500/519]90%

This person is a specialist in Social Interaction and economics at the 70th percentile related to educational research at the 80th percentile. She (or he) has a Background in applied mathematics and physics at the 90th percentile. She (or he) is a trained ethicist at the 75th percentile, philosopher, and artist specializing in musical theory and orchestration at the 50th percentile. Fluent English and Spanish

Now, we have a system of numbers and symbols represent the knowledge of the person in a tangible manner.

Keep in mind that this is only a demonstration, however, we see some key advantages:

1.    The Inventory is Infinite and expandable to any field of knowledge
2.    Paints a picture of knowledge and not simply a list of information about a person.
3.    Machine enabled, programmable, and readable.

Now, all of the tools, methods, and equations in the world of banking, finance, and insurance can be used to combine, amalgamate, and diversify knowledge assets in an innovation market.

Your resume can now be combined with other resumes to represent the collective knowledge of a community.  This expression carries all of the information that an entrepreneur needs in order to estimate the probability that the community can execute a business plan.  We will discuss predictive characteristics extensively in future modules.

In the next section, we will talk about the institutions that exist in our communities through computer enabled society which will keep this game free, fair – and most importantly, equitable.

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The Next Economic Paradigm; Part 2, Currency

Welcome to part 2 of the New Economic Paradigm series.

In part 1 we determined that money represents human productivity and the only way to sustainably create wealth was to innovate.

Then we identified the flaw that money lives in a complex and integrated system while Innovation does not, rather, innovation is isolated, random, non-integrated and subservient to the financial system.

This module discusses the currency of the innovation economy.

A Currency is anything that serves as a medium of exchange, a stored value, and a standard of value.

We  all know that Dollar denominated money is a medium of exchange – but it does not represent gold or silver or even oil, it represents human productivity.  Money, and therefore all financial instruments store value related to human productivity.

When we look into society throughout history, everywhere people are trading information and ideas with each other at some velocity.  The Internet and social media (machine enabled society) has sped this process up to incredible rates.  All of this information adds up to something because obviously things get built and stuff rolls off assembly lines.  Furthermore, people act on information obtained from each other to produce things.

The currency of trade for the next economic paradigm must represent this “stock exchange”

Intuitively we know that information, knowledge and innovation are profoundly related to each other.  In fact, if you don’t have one, you can’t have the other two.  Our currency of trade must represent all three; information, knowledge, and innovation.  Therefore, we need to redefine these terms in a manner that relates them.

First we must define ‘information’. That’s easy, information is facts and data.

Next we need to define ‘knowledge’ in terms of information: Any good teacher can tell you that information must be introduced in a certain sequence and at a certain speed in order for the student to learn. Knowledge is therefore proportional to the rate of change of information.

For the purposes of this analysis, we will use the following definition:  Innovation is defined by the rate of change of knowledge where knowledge is defined by the rate of change of information.  For example; everyone has had an ‘Ah-Ha!’ moment during a brain storming session, or after making a mistake, or after witnessing a profound event. The AH-HA moment represents a very high rate of change in our knowledge that occurs in a very short period of time.

According to this definition, every idea,  conversation, dream, design, sketch, or discovery experienced and shared between two or more people is an innovation.

Math students can see that this definition sets up a differential equation that we can use to model the innovation system computationally – something that cannot be done with the current definitions.

Now let’s look at the “economic outcome” part

The factors of production for the industrial economy are land labor and capital.  Entrepreneurs allocate these three factors in different combination in the formation and growth of corporations.  If any of these factors of production are missing, dysfunctional, or corrupted – the corporation stops producing.

We have learned that in the knowledge economy, the location of knowledge work is highly mobile – so “Land” does not have the same significance for making things as it did 100 years ago.

What about labor? Knowledge workers analyze situations, manage many variables, and create unique solutions.  They do not really produce identical knowledge pieces like a machine operator or a production worker.  Everything they see and do becomes part of their relevant knowledge set: 24/7/365. The idea of an 8 hour day and pay-by-the-hour are no longer relevant.

Capital is money needed to build future structures, buy machines and to pay wages. Today, money provides access to information. The current economic meltdown demonstrates that where the information is corrupted, the money is corrupted – and so becomes everything connected to the money.

We now see that many old economic principles do not work quite as well in the new economies. Yet, the Land, Labor, and Capital theory is still the foundation of much of today’s corporate, academic, government, financial, and social thinking.

Using our definition for innovation, we can see that the innovation economy will emerge from the rate of change of the knowledge economy.  Today we are witnessing an astonishing growth in social media and a breakdown of traditional media for the dissemination of information.

The factors of production for the new currency are Intellectual Capital, Social Capital, and Creative Capital.

Intellectual Capital is also called Human Capital – and suggests that concentrations of educated and motivated people attract investors to employ them and invest in the communities where they reside.  This investment attracts other intelligent people who in turn attract more investment thereby creating a cycle of economic growth

The Social Capital Model suggests that people acting in communities can create better solutions, greater accountability, and more economic growth than management, governments, or bureaucracy can induce on their own.  Examples of Social Capital include Civil Rights Movement, community watch organizations, Democratic Government, Social Networking, and notably, recent political changes events.

The Creative Capital model, suggests that engineers and scientists think more like artists and musicians than like production workers – their ideas come 24/7/365 – and that an environment of tolerance, diversity, and openness promotes creative output.

A Currency is anything that serves as a medium of exchange, a stored value, and a standard of value.

In the current financial economy, the currency is a dollar.  The rate of change of the currency is called appreciation, depreciation, or “interest”.  The rate of change of interest is the growth rate or compounding. These are very familiar conditions in finance and the basis for a company’s stock price.

In the innovation economy, information is the currency.  Knowledge is the rate of change of information, and innovation is the rate of change of knowledge.

This will become a very familiar and useful relationship in the innovation economy.

For example, innovation is difficult to measure directly.  However, we can measure the rate of change of knowledge as a proxy for innovation.  It is difficult to measure knowledge.  However, we can measure the rate of change of information as a proxy for knowledge.

In finance and calculus, these are called derivatives.

In the next module we will discuss the inventory and accounting system for an innovation economy.

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What Comes After the Knowledge Economy?

The Ingenesist Project was featured in this video for Social Media Connection Broadcast Network produced by Jay Deragon. This is the first of many videos that we will be producing in order to explain what the Ingenesist Project is and why it is so important.

The Innovation Economy is the next level of economic development following the knowledge economy.  It will not be induced by corporations, Wall Street, or even the Federal Government.  This is something that we must create for ourselves as a social movement.  Social Media will play a pivotal role in this next economic paradigm.

Please watch this video and send any comments, questions, or ideas for future broadcasts about the Ingenesist Project.

I would like to thank all of our contributors for their endless support.

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Putting the System Back into Social

Social Media is a demanding master with the uncanny ability to determine the absence or presence of checks and balances.  As a self correcting market, what you do not say can have a greater impact than what you do say.

Of Profit and Peril:

There are great perils in getting social media wrong and great profit from getting it right.  Kids posting negative images can be haunted forever.  Corporations hawking wares can erode their brand. Egocentrics touting their own magnificence can find themselves isolated.  Yet every day, people are controversial, people are selling stuff, and there are is no shortage of egomaniacs in social media space – what are they doing right?

Family Values:

Corporations and individuals are finding out that the social media space requires a much larger degree of disclosure than traditional media simply because markets are most efficient in an environment of perfect information – that is, when the buyer and the seller have the exact same information as the other when negotiating a transaction.  Only then can the magic of supply and demand arrive at one correct “valuation”.

By contrast, an inefficient market of imperfect information cannot arrive at a true price, rather, somewhere in a range of prices.  This is defined as volatility.  When the price is unknown, transactions fail to occur, and markets devalue.  Volatility is the enemy.

Perfect Strangers:

As entrepreneurs have increasingly perfect access to information, it is no longer a successful dominant strategy for corporations to withhold information.  The corporation no longer competes with their nearest competitor; they compete with perfect information in the reputation market.  So what may seem like the wisdom dance of an enlightened industrial complex is really a shrewd and long overdue acknowledgment that perfect information is in the best interest of everyone.

Neighborhood watch organization:

The next step for Social Media will be the most powerful manifestation of perfect information ever to be crowd sourced; systems of checks and balances.  Where checks and balances are in place, information improves.  If not, information decays.

An easy way to determine the presence or absence of checks and balances is to remove one element form the relationship and see if the other two become disassociated.  Inversely, one way to creating checks and balances is to associate two elements by means of a third:

Triangulation:

1. Information, knowledge, and innovation;  Without one, the other two have little value.
2. Social Capital, Creative Capital, and Intellectual Capital; Without one, the other two have little value.
3. Openness, communication, and accountability; Without one, the other two have little value.
4. Trust, self expression, and connections; Without one, the other two have little value.

Etc.

Putting the System back into Social

The difference between success and failure depend your ability to systemize the social media presence.  Sound confusing?  It shouldn’t be. When you think about it, there rules are not much different between managing social media relationships and off-line personal and business relationships.

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Creative Credit Crisis

“Luke, use the Force”

Creativity is a mystery to many – like an invisible force that drives the universe but can only be seen in retrospect.  If so, then Hollywood is the master of retrospect.

Most movie viewers think that the credits at the end of a movie are for their benefit.  Then they get frustrated when the print is so small and scrolling impossibly fast.  Actually, the credits are for the benefit of Hollywood. This is their knowledge management system.  They know how to communicate the Force.

“Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more”

Being listed in movie credits is by no means an easy task. Every creative job from lead actor to hairdresser has a category. It often takes many years, serious peer review, and marketable success.  However, once listed in the credits you become a managing partner, shareholder, and a currency in the Hollywood creative capital inventory.  This inventory is captured and categorized in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).  This is their resume system.

As a credited creative worker, you are forever on public display; a good movie credit reflects well on your credits and a bad movie may reflect poorly.  You need to be somewhat selective over what projects to work on.  Likewise, everyone will check the credits of others that are working on the project.  Everyone cooperates fully and in the best interest of the production.  It is in everyone’s best interest to be correctly allocated in the creative capital pool.

“Here’s lookin’ at you, kid”

It’s all about who knows you. The Producers proactively seek and test the “secret sauce” for communicating drama, comedy, action, etc.  They reflect on past projects then attempt to capture strategic combinations of creative capital assets for future projects.  The project becomes the people. The people celebrate each other on award nights and through tangential media. They adopt technology, share ideas, and diversify readily.  As a result, creativity and innovation are quite predictable.

“You’re going to need a bigger boat”

Contrast this to the traditional American Corporation – the ones that we expect to float us out of this financial meltdown through vast new wisdom, creativity, and innovation.  Most are top-down command and control operations with many layers of management that all have the power to say “no”, but not the power to say “yes”.  Instead of arriving at the best decisions, they often arrive at the least-worst decisions.

“Theater is like a box of chocolates”

Now, reflect on this nascent social media industry unfolding all around us.  Readers harvest new ideas on public display from all over the world and apply them to local products.   Such products, by definition, reflect the goals, aspiration, talents, and interests of the people who create them.  The content improves information shared by many sources.  Content of merit with enough credits can elevate the author to the status of “thought leader”.  But something is still missing.

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate”

Social media needs a definite product that the whole industry can rally around – that product is ‘communication’.  Social media must produce, improve, and deliver communication. Very few problems are created by communication but many problems are solved with communication.  Communication improves information, knowledge and innovation.  Solved problems are defined as innovations. It is a simple matter of how we organize ourselves;  as a creative industry or as a control industry.

Credits:

Star Wars

Wizard of Oz

Casablanca

Jaws

Twitter

Cool Hand Luke

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Innovation Bonds: 3 Million Jobs

Another approach for spending a Trillion dollars (backed by debt) would be for the government to issue innovation bonds (backed by innovation) to fund new enterprise.  Surely the World still greatly admires and respects American Ingenuity (social capital, intellectual capital, and creative capital) and would likely buy such a financial instrument instead of more of our debt.

The final frontier; your backyard

The Last Mile of social media is a vastly unexploited resource with an astonishing wealth creation potential.  The Ingenesist Project (TIP) specifies a structure for an innovation economy through the application of 3 simple web applications deployed to social media that will ignite “The Last Mile”.

Already, people use social media to harvest great ideas from around the world.  The Ingenesist Project will enable global ideas to be applied in local economies throughout our communities.

Running Numbers:

The sweet spot for Last Mile social media is (2-6) people living within a (1-6) square mile area. Assume an average innovator density is about (1) person per square mile.  The United States is a little more than (3) million square miles.  If only (1) of the thousands upon thousands of potential applications of Last Mile social media were implemented across the country, then (3) million jobs would be created.

Dan’s List; Leave a Tip

Here is a list of (10) hypothetical business ideas that a buddy and I dreamed up over lunch using TIP methodology for inducing an Innovation Economy.  Each of these ideas has a working revenue model.

1.    Zertify: This company is a last mile/vetting social media application where neighbors “Zertify their Zillow Zestimates”.
2.    Start Up Neighborhood (SUN): is a last mile social media application where neighbors get together to innovate and create new businesses.
3.    ScatterWatt: is a last mile social media application for decentralizing power generation aggregating local clean power generation systems (rooftop wind, solar, greenery).
4.    ComPrac: is a last mile/vetting application of social media that forms and organizes communities of practice for the purpose of mentorship and cooperation in innovation.
5.    CombinePac: is a last mile/vetting application of social media that combines communities of practice strategically for the purpose of tangential innovation
6.    TopUse: is a last mile social media/vetting application that makes best use of already disturbed lands saving undisturbed lands from exploitation.
7.    CodeVitae: is last mile/vetting service that translates CVs and job descriptions into universal decimal classification system for computerized analysis, normalization, and improved allocation.
8.    Proximizer: A last mile social media application that reallocates knowledge assets for best proximity to home space for carbon credits.
9.    CarbonCops: is last mile social media application to register, certify, and implement carbon savings ideas.
10.    VetBucks: is a last mile/vetting site for the verifying expenditure of public funds.

Improving Information for Fun and Profit:

The degree to which information is improved in a market is the degree to which the innovation adds value.  As such, monetization becomes a relatively simple matter.  Furthermore, the options that are created will have a multiplier effect in the communities as neighbors learn what knowledge assets are available with which to cooperate in their communities and where their knowledge assets can be deployed productively. New ideas generate more new ideas as the markets will seek to fill in the blank spots and support more structure for innovation economy.

An Endowment for their Grandchildren:

While the leadership elders are to be respected for their wisdom and accomplishments, they have very little comprehension of the economic growth potential of social media. It is understandable that they may overlook this opportunity.  The capitalization of social media lays in the hands of the young people who know exactly what to do if given the opportunity.  Why not give them a shot at getting the books in order?  Call it their inheritance.

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If It Ain’t Broker, Don’t Fix It.

The function of the innovation economy is to improve information.  This has the derivative effect of improving knowledge which, by definition, fuels more innovation.   Monetization is easy if we simply improve information between any buyer and any seller in any market, anywhere.

…If it is, please do

For example, the job of a broker is to mediate the transaction between a buyer and a seller.  There are real estate brokers, mortgage brokers, stock brokers, etc.  Unfortunately, it is not always in the best interest of the broker to provide perfect information to both sides of the transaction.  Rather, the broker provides the minimum amount of information needed to complete the transaction, within which they build their commission for rendering such filtration services.

Any B-school undergrad can tell you that a market is most efficient when the buyer and the seller have exactly the same information as the other when making a transaction; this is called “perfect information”.  As such, “supply and demand” can do its magic.  Resources of production can be perfectly allocated in the glorious capitalist system.  The financial meltdown has shown us that the more complex the product is, the greater the deficiency in perfect information becomes.

The Holy Grail:

The great opportunity for social media is the ability to improve information in almost every transaction conceivable and create wealth.  The next generation of social media strategists will rise to tremendous heights in this domain of the Innovation Economy. However, the Holy Grail of information improvement is the knowledge asset market itself:

For example: Corporations have a great deal more information about employees than employees have about corporations.  People are encouraged to compete with each other, not to cooperate, for that carrot on a stick. They are trained to keep their salary a secret.  The “job statement” is in a secret code language that is only understood inside the company, not in the general work force.  Managers “broker” information by filtering it on the way up and on the way down the corporate structure.  It is little wonder that corporations are having a tough time with the social media stuff.

When the layoff comes, the outsourcing begins, or the life change happens, the resume is often no better than a bingo card in a key word lottery.  By the way, customers have even less information than the employees. Peanuts anyone?

The mothers of Invention

The knowledge market is the mother of all imperfect information markets.  Social media is a single iteration away from greatly improving information in all knowledge markets. Nothing happens without applied human knowledge, as such, the potential capitalization of the next generation of social media applications is as big as the market itself – and it will challenge the very structure of the traditional corporation and associated filtration services.

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Got a Life?

Geographic Compatibility:

In the early 1990’s, traffic in Los Angeles was so horrendous, it could take hours to travel a dozen miles.  Commuting was a nightmare and the last thing anyone wanted to do was sit in more traffic.  As a single professional, every time I met a prospective lady friend, I had that elemental question in the back of my mind – and so did she: are we Geographically Compatible (GC)?

The sweet spot:

I recall many a magical conversation ending with that mutual inevitable shrug of the shoulders; a secret code for “have a nice life”.  In Los Angeles, GC peaked in the sweet spot of 1-6 miles.  After that, GC diminished roughly proportional to the square of distance with 20 miles as an absolute maximum.  Any more was no closer or farther than, say, Nashville.

The cost of ownership:

Today, not only must we contend with traffic and the cost of owning a car, we must attend to a warming planet were every gallon of gas burned spews 19 lbs of CO2 to the atmosphere.  In addition, we have a deepening deficit of the most valuable asset in our lives and the lives of those around us; time, bandwidth, productivity, sleep, money, innovation; it’s all the same convertible currency.  All are wasted equally behind the wheel of an automobile.

Social Experiment:

With this in mind, I did a little experiment.  I went to Linkedin and conducted a search for everyone within 6 miles of me.  All that they offered was a 10 mile range and with keyword search too.  The results were very interesting; not ideal but not too shabby.  I tried the same with Facebook, and the best I could do was search by zip code.  It was very awkward and the profile search feature only allowed me to query my existing contacts.  I am guessing that there is some sort of security issue that restricts this type of searching.  Too many nuts, flakes and stalks in that granola, I suppose.

Not unlike the LA dating scene, the future of innovation economics, global sustainability, quality of life, social support structure, family values, and money management will rely increasingly on GC; and the constraints will not end soon.  Social Media must understand the monetization potential of GC and develop robust applications to support it.

If that is not enough convincing, try this:

‘The Jane Jacobs externality’ named after a transformational sociologist of the same name, suggests that concentrations of educated and skilled people attract companies and investment to a geographical area.  The presence of such investment attracts more educated and skilled people to that area; also referred to as “intellectual capital”.

Harvard Professor and Author, Dr. Robert Putnam concluded that people acting in groups can produce far more economic growth faster and better than corporations and government combined. This is called “Social Capital”.

Carnegie Melon Professor and Author, Dr. Richard Florida, suggests that artists and engineers think more similarly 24/7/365, than managers and production workers.  This is called “Creative Capital”.

Factors of production:

All three; intellectual capital, social capital, and creative capital are wholly and utterly dependent on GC.  These are the factors of production of an Innovation Economy.

Evidence of these effects can be demonstrated by the civil rights movement, woman suffrage, neighborhood watch, Silicon Valley, Seattle, Greenwich Village, Austin Texas, Boston, Hollywood, Chicago, NYC, and many more locations where ‘wealth’ is located.  What came first, the money or the people?

So, what part of monetization is Social Media having difficult with?  The sweet spot is 1-6 miles, so get the hint and get it fast. Meanwhile, billions upon billions of magical conversations end with that inevitable shrug of the mouse; a secret code for “have a nice life”.  I say, get a life.

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Social Media; The Engine of New Economic Growth

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Business Models of the Future:

The great new social media business models of the future will be in the areas of “The Last Mile of social media” and “Social Vetting mechanisms”.   I have written about these two elements in the past.  However, this article will attempt to focus on how the future engine of economic growth can use social media platforms to power social capitalism.

The Last Mile:

The Last Mile of social media is where the rubber meets the road.  I can chat with people all over the world on Twitter and Facebook, but nothing happens until I walk out of the house and meet real people in real time to create a real business that really increases real human productivity.  If I can accomplish that, monetization is simple matter.

If everyone is harvesting ideas from all over the world, Last Mile technology is the key to bringing these ideas to the ground.  The new social enterprises will develop, support, enable, and service the structure for innovation in neighborhoods and communities.

Feel the Burn:

To understand the power of this paradigm; there is little doubt that the leader of the free world was elected by the Last Mile.  That is huge.  Now, when the Last Mile is in trouble with mounting layoffs, foreclosures, and wealth destruction, eyebrows are raised, headlines make the first page, and everyone is wondering what will happen in to the Last Mile.  In 1992, this author saw Los Angeles burn over a whole lot less than what’s coming down the pipes today.  This is not a game, this is very serious stuff.

Social Vetting:

Social Vetting, on the other hand, is less understood, but like a tornado there is nothing subtle about the forces that it can impart against the darkness of secrecy.  All markets become more efficient in the presence of an effective vetting mechanism, as such, monetization is a simple matter.  Conversely, the absence of vetting is the root of all corruption – as we are now painfully aware.

Begging for Mercy:

To understand the power of this paradigm; Facebook was recently brought to its knees by Social Vetting.  First, a social watchdog group noticed the change in the terms of service and set the dials on “viral”.  Facebook users organized immediately and lay siege to the core validity of a 3.5 billion dollar new media titan.  Within hours, Facebook was backpedaling. The 300 billion dollar marketing industry, ravenous for viewer impressions, was sent back to the drawing boardroom.  Meanwhile, legacy media spin took pot shots at Facebook’s inability to monetize the value it claims to create.  Again, this is not a game, this is serious business.

Role play

In each of these examples social media responded effectively to an existing injustice.  This presents the dire question:  If the Last Mile and Social Vetting can have such a profound effect in the REACTIVE role, what would be the underlying dynamic if applied in the PROACTIVE role ?

The Engine of Economic Growth:

Consider this: Social media has no problem scaling up, rather, it has a problem scaling down.  The Last Mile and Social Vetting represents the compression cycle of the new economic engine.  The spark of innovation ignites the secret sauce to scale upward.  With a repeatable cycle, we can literally create an engine of economic growth cycling from down-scaling to up-scaling, and back to down-scaling, and so forth, forever.  Each combustion cycle literally pumps value into an economic system.

Master of Puppets:

I’ll let the reader now ponder the cause and effect sequences of this proposition.  But I will leave one hint: Wall Street becomes the servant, not the master.  As such, monetization becomes a simple matter.

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The Global Financial Crisis; The End Game

The year is 2024, no burning cities, no mass hysteria, no bread lines; the economy is on an exponential growth curve.  It took a while, but the financial crisis of ended in an anticlimactic sort of way.  Sure, lots of hedge fund bankers became unemployed, some went to jail, and many companies once deemed titans of industry have disappeared, but nobody seemed to notice much anymore.

Government debt has been eliminated and Wall Street has become the steward of what has become an Innovation Economy rising from the ashes of debt economics.  The transition, in fact, was surprisingly smooth.  Social Network applications such as Facebook, Linkedin, G+, and many more, developed a clever way to make knowledge tangible outside the construct of Wall Street and the traditional corporations and people began trading knowledge like currency.

When inflation hit, the dollar started to fall in value, people began trading a different currency called the rallod (dollar spelled backwards).  The rallod was backed by future productivity resulting from innovation rather than future productivity supporting debt.  When the dollar finally crashed, it pegged to the rallod and the economy began to grow again with an astonishing, yet peaceful, transfer of wealth and power to open sourced self-regulating communities; i.e., society in general.  The vicious cycle of debt economics was reversed just in time.  It’s still hard to believe what happened.

Today the engines of economic growth are tens of thousands of hot new start-ups that exist in the form of “Value Games” related to specific technology areas rather than the old corporation model.  They automatically cluster around a technology and spin off other start-ups at an incredible rate in a strange nesting arrangement called the “tangential innovation” market.  Most innovation is open sourced because the “Patent” (and protectionism in general) is no longer the center of the innovation finance universe, rather, the “secret sauce” of social, creative, and intellectual capital is the most valuable asset today.

About 15 years ago, something resembling the human genome project mapped all knowledge in the form of social, creative, and intellectual capital that exists in society to a very high granularity.  An API standard was created to represent knowledge assets like packets of code that are processed by a community algorithm. The CV/resume is an old bar joke now. Thanks to a visionary government, 1st amendment protections were built into this inventory with anonymity laws and privatized TOU; creators own what they create.

An open source percentile search engine was created to enable entrepreneurs to build unique collections of knowledge assets and predict the probability that various combinations of these assets could successfully execute a business plan.  High diversification induced hyper-innovation around technologies and the resulting innovations are spun out to be reabsorbed by different and diverse communities of practice in continuous iterations forming a virtuous vortex of new systems, methods, and solutions.  Sketched out, these arrangements looked like electrical “integrated” circuits.  Wealth creation is intense.

Since the knowledge inventory has mapped all knowledge and the Percentile Search Engine calculated probabilities and scenarios, the Innovation bank formed to make most worthy and optimal matches between knowledge surplus and knowledge deficit in a community.  Since the probability of innovation success has become predictable, innovation risk is now diversified away.  Innovation insurance products abound. With near-zero innovation risk the cost of venture capital has approached 5-7 % instead of 500-2000% of less than a decade ago.  Banks now issue innovation bonds on the public market to finance innovation in society.  For an investment of such high return and such little risk, participation is near universal.  This created another virtuous circle; the more innovation that occurs, the more money is created.  The more money that is created, the more innovation occurs.

Instead of having jobs, many people in a geographic area are pinged by the Percentile Search Engine which calculates the likelihood that their interaction together will increase the probability of successful execution of a business plan when combined with other knowledge assets.  Instead of earning wages, people collect micro-royalties specified by contracts on capital asset sub-sections. These micro-royalties add up to substantial residual income enjoying a multiplier effect as their work continues downstream over their lifetime. The government funds social security through it’s own innovation ventures. Service workers such as police, teachers, fire fighters, nurses, local merchants, etc., are key beneficiaries because of their impact on the community is directly associated with productivity.

Many of the senior knowledge workers have determined that they can earn more money by taking an equity position in their students, and the students of their student.  Unlike a decade ago, pyramid schemes in innovation economics are sustainable and generate astonishing profits.  Mentors have entered the landscape in vast numbers and apprenticeships have become abundant.  The income potential for the “creating creators” boggles the imagination.   Again, a virtuous circle has formed between the mentor and the student. In aggregate, wisdom is being retained, refined, and transferred efficiently throughout social networks.

University “degrees” have disappeared in favor of unique combinations of knowledge assets that are continually SEO’d for best Percentile Search Engine Placement.  People do not compete directly, rather, they compete with the Percentile Search Engine in the local market place by cooperating among each other.  As owners of their knowledge assets, the entrepreneurial spirit is ubiquitous.  No individual has either a monopoly or an identical knowledge set as anyone else.  Everyone has perfect information about the knowledge assets in a market.  People are pinged for different reasons at different times for different rates depending on supply and demand.  Continuous education is a social event in itself, often mistaken for recreation!

Even the poorest areas of the planet are getting into the action because, by definition, the parts of an economy with the highest potential for technological change correspond to opportunities that return the highest dividends in an innovation economy.  Arbitrage opportunities between master and oppressor have disappeared worldwide.

Like a neural network, the economic system of tangible knowledge is self-correcting, fault tolerant, and self-regulating.  Governments across the globe tried to stop the social network driven innovation economy – but they eventually gave up.  It was like trying to stop water; it flowed between the cracks and simply eroded the barriers.  The most incredible outcome is that innovation now reflects long term social priorities instead of short term Wall Street priorities.

Oil production has been replaced by superconducting wind turbines, global temperatures have stabilized, all cars are electric or “water leakers” (as the hydro’s are affectionately known), many diseases have been cured, and the list goes on.  It is hard to believe this happened in only 12 years.  Then again, the Internet had only been widely used 15 years prior to 2009.  Did I mention, we’re finally sending a multinational expedition to Mars…

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Necessity Is The The Mother of All Stimuli

So who exactly is paying for this? The next economic stimulus package will not come from the halls of Washington or the boardrooms of Wall Street, but from the streets of America.  The objective of The Ingenesist Project is to induce a crowd sourced innovation economy by integrating Social Media with three web applications. It’s all about to become extremely exciting.

Social Media Grows Legs

There only remains three tiny applications yet to be developed and deployed to social media that will allow human knowledge to become tangible outside the construct of a corporation, and therefore, independent of Wall Street.  Social media technology is very close to duplicating nearly every function of the corporation outside of the traditional corporate structure.  America’s most valuable asset is not money, it is social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital, and it’s about to stand up, brush itself off, and walk away from the mess left by the excesses of greed and power.

The Evolution of a Species:

1. Social Media will be used to develop a knowledge inventory in a computer code based on, say, the Dewey Decimal System.  Suddenly, human knowledge will become organized like a library and searchable by computer in very high resolution.

2. Boolean logic will be applied to the knowledge inventory and the resume will be replaced by a high resolution computer readable descriptive code.

3. Communities of practice will normalize (bell curve) their knowledge domain. At this point, knowledge will appear in the same form as a financial instrument and can then be treated as a tangible asset.

4. A percentile search engine will calculate the probability that a various collections of knowledge assets can execute collections of innovation business plan scenarios.

5. An Innovation Bank will match most worthy knowledge deficit to most worthy knowledge surplus and keep a record of the “secret sauce” of success feeding back to the search engine.

Wall Street Calculus:

Using the same equations as Wall Street, the Innovation Bank will predict the probability that a venture will be successful given a set of knowledge assets.  The Innovation Bank can then predict the future cash flows associated with the venture. Now, thousands of ventures and their predicted cash flows can be combined, diversified, and diced up into innovation bonds having superior returns over any other investment.  Investors will flood the Innovation System with cash.  This cash will be used to fund more innovation investment and the cycle will continue.  Everyone takes an equity position and innovation reflects social priorities rather than Wall Street priorities.  This changes everything.

This can happen today with existing infrastructure.  The only thing needed is a social movement; that’s what Americans are best at.  Where does this leave Wall Street, failing businesses, and all their debt?  The funny thing about knowledge assets is that they can walk if necessary.

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The First Mile in Social Media

The Last Mile….

Back in the early days of Broadband, the cost of sending a signal across the Pacific Ocean was negligible compared to the cost of delivering that signal to everyone in town – the problem was called the called “The Last Mile”.

Predictably, companies battled it out in the Dot-Com Wars with a flurry of IPOs and hostile takeovers clambering to fill “The Last Mile” void.  Then the issue largely disappeared.  I guess the cable TV folks figured it out because that is who I send my money to for the speedy bits.  Last week I was chatting with the FiOS folks burying fiber optic cable near my mailbox.  They said it’s going to get faster.

…of Social Media….

Social media currently suffers from “The Last Mile” syndrome.  Social Media applications have enabled me to make friends in India, Israel, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, and everywhere in between. I can shout out to 3 million people with the click of a mouse, but not the wonderful family living a few houses down the street.   I met them while chatting with the FiOS folks who were burying fiber optic cable near our mailboxes.

…is where the rubber meets the road

I really enjoy my online friends and the sharing of information makes me smarter and introduces me to new ideas.  But these ideas are not very productive until I apply them to something that actually touches the ground, like the FiOS cables.  The secret to finding a business case for social media can be found in “The Last Mile”.  It would seem that innovators and entrepreneurs would be strafing each other to fill this vastly under served market and lucrative market segment. This is where the money is. Hello, is this thing on?

But the scalability is lost.

I have found a few applications like Meet-up, Biznik, Ning, Neighborex, Start-up Weekend, etc., but they are just not catching fire like the calculus suggests that they should.  The problem is that the scaling is lost.  The advertising revenue model carried over from radio and TV requires millions of impressions to be viable.  The demographic of “The Last Mile” are groups of 2-8 people living within a few miles of each other – a corporate business model just does not exist to serve “The Last Mile”.

The First Mile…

Meanwhile, the old one-way advertising model is dying off quickly and the two-way advertising paradigm is sending all the major corporations and media outlets to the drawing board looking for the social media strategy.  Corporation are now expected to provide real value to a community, but they can’t figure out how to scale that value. The Irony is that most of those same corporations were started by 2-8 people living within a few miles of each other.  Maybe we should call it “The First Mile” and then re investigate the role of Social Media.

…holds the the secret sauce…

In the future of innovation economics, patents will not be the most valuable object, rather, the secret sauce that comes up with the innovations that will be the most valuable.  Corporation can employ social media to provide a practical and repeatable program that empowers a community.  Corporations can strategically assemble local entrepreneurs into spin-off entities. Corporations could license their IP, open-source their technologies, share internal strategy, and provide executive coaching that helps community teams to form new corporations discovering tangential and future markets.  Corporations should teach people what they do best – making money.

…where the scalability is found.

So where is the scalability?  Hey, let me hop on my new FiOS line with my 8 friends from down the street and we’ll just shout out to our 24 million global neighbors – and we’ll get back to you.

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The Relationship Economist

The Office of the Relationship Economist of the United States:

President Obama said in his inaugural address;

“Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished”

This is true; so what changed?

Mr. Obama’s statement is profound; in a single stroke, he divorced human knowledge, talent, creativity, and intellect from dependency on the financial markets.  In one short statement, he reversed the old world order where economic growth drives relationships rather than relationships driving economic growth. Mr. Obama has made people tangible as financial instruments in their own right.  The language needed to change, only then could the relationships change and therefore, the economics.

Calculus: The Science of Change.

Change is everywhere.  The only thing certain is change itself. We vote for change we can believe in, we are aware of climate change, and we see the world constantly changing all around us. Each of these sentiments is an expression of the mathematical discipline of Calculus

Calculus got a bad rap with most of us in High School. Calculus has boring charts, funny symbols, strange sentences, and objects flying around in a frictionless space – nothing could be further from reality, so it seemed.  In reality, however, nothing could be simpler.  Early civilization noticed that seasons change over time. Farmers noticed that plants changed over time. Isaac Newton noticed that the speed of the apple changed over time as it fell.  Copernicus noticed that the location of the planets changed over time, etc.  We all notice and respond to change.

Economics: The science of Incentives:

Bankers noticed that the value of money could also change.  To lend money out for future repayment, there is a likelihood that something will change; good change, bad change, or no change. So, in order to avoid bad change and to keep good change, the lender charges “interest” on the money.  Interest represents the change of money over time – but not the reality of the change itself. Consequently, the change of money induced incentives for people to behave differently and this changed reality. For better and worse, reality reflected the incentives rather than the incentives reflecting reality.

The Language of Change:

Today our language is changing at an incredible speed – most words associated with the human condition have changed in definition over only a few decades ago. The words “relationship”, “society”, “marketing”, “innovation”, “media”, “democracy”, “productivity”, and many others, all have expanded meanings.  Now we need to create new words to describe new realities; Computer enabled society, Social Capitalism, Web 3.0, relationship economy, innovation economy.  What is the incentive?

Relationship: The Science of Communication

Now here is where Calculus gets complicated: If words are changing and communication is connected to the words, then communication is changing too.  If communication is changing, and productivity is connected to communication, then productivity is changing too. If productivity is changing, and the economy is connected to productivity, then the economy is changing too.

The Relationship Economy:

Just like money, the change in our relationships induces an incentive or disincentive to behave a certain way.  For better or worse, incentives will reflect reality rather than reality reflecting the incentibes.  That’s a game changer.

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The Trojan Horse; A Classic Social Fraud

Periods of change in any market open the doors for abuse as control systems often lag behind the waves.  This is especially true for social capitalism where the social contract is changing rapidly and the enforcement mechanisms are largely non-existent.

All markets must have effective vetting mechanisms in order for the market to be viable.  If the game is not fair – real investors and real entrepreneurs don’t walk, they run…away.  While much fraud is obvious and predictable, the most damaging is the type that nobody sees coming but can destroy the standard of trust for everyone, forever, like the Trojan horse.

Hypothetical Case Study:

A self-proclaimed innovation consultant runs a blog out of anywhere USA.  They have a catchy domain name and their ranking is unusually high for a 5 month old blog with splashy but infrequent articles.

In the spirit of the X-prize, the blogger promotes an Innovation Contest offering $60,000 dollars worth of his company’s “Marketing Consultation” services as a prize to the next innovation that will change the world! … as judged by a “panel of experts”.  The blogger encourages all entrants to send their social network to vote up their innovation as this will weigh heavily into the judging.  Many people submit their work and diligently mine their Facebook and Linkedin networks for the vote.

The contest ends and the winning idea earned zero external votes but it is in an industry that is very popular in mainstream media and slated for government stimulus.  However, it is clearly not up to par with many of the other entrants.  Upon inquiry, the blog author does not specify the criteria for judging, he does not itemize the prize, he does not publish his “panel of experts” and he does not post any dissenting opinions or inquiries submitted to the moderated comments.

A few days later, a press release appears on Google news; “$60,000 dollar innovation contest prize awarded for breakthrough in targeted industry”.  Leading tech media pick up the story and the “consultant” is hailed for defending the struggle of the unsung heroes of the innovation economy.  It appears to the contestants that the consultant is promoting himself at their expense.

So, what’s wrong with that?

First; for all of the innovators who submit themselves to judgment and expend their social capital on votes, the integrity of the contest must be bullet-proof.  The definition of the objective, the judges, and judging criteria must be specified absolutely. Otherwise, good ideas will not be shared.

Second; if potential sponsors of a legitimate X-prize-type contest are challenged in their sincerity to promote world-changing innovation, and instead are accused of self-promotion and media bias, a tremendously valuable resource of the innovation economy will be squandered.

Finally; if a person’s social networks are mobilized to vote in any type of contest – they must know that the time they invest will be respected and valued or they will no longer participate in other contests.

To this day, the clever ruse of the Trojans remains the fraud of choice for new market technologies. It has also marked the standard of trust that we hold forth in our relationships and invitation to our inner circle. Sharing of one’s friends is a deeply intimate act of faith and trust many times greater than sharing one’s ideas. The caregivers, those who hold forth the willingness to nurture that trust, must be qualified as stewards of the public endowment of social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital.

Social Capitalism depends heavily on the function and performance of communities. A “paranoid bias” could be vastly damaging – possibly constraining the next great paradigm of economic development from achieving critical mass.   Social Capitalism is not a game, it’s serious business.

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The Shift to Social Capitalism

As computer enabled society marches toward social capitalism as a result of overburdened financial institutions, a new generation of social media applications will form to emulate those institutions.  Social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital will increasingly behave like tangible assets.

Economic and Privacy

Our credit score is a statistical sampling system in which we compete with ourselves for the cost of money.  We lose some privacy with the credit score, but we accept these terms to the degree that we enjoy the benefit.  After all, we can literally print money today to build a businesses backed by future productivity (financial capitalism).  If this benefit disappears, so too will the paradigm and something else will take its place.

Social Media and Privacy

Similarly, we lose privacy with social media; we drop our resume on Monster, we post our profile to Facebook, we express opinion on a Blog, and search engines display this activity.  But we accept these terms to the degree that we enjoy some benefit from our social network.  Whatever that benefit is, we know that it is real, it is tangible, and it has value – otherwise, people would not do it.  This is the nascent domain of Social Capitalism.

Cover your Assets

Like financial capitalism, social capitalism will be the ability to borrow knowledge assets today to build a business backed by future productivity of those assets.  In order to anticipate how social capitalism may be structured, we continue with the analogy:

The FICO equation churns about 22 variables related to your financial behavior. These variables include debt load, asset value, income, payment history, etc. Input data comes from past lenders for the benefit of future lenders, as well as insurance companies, employers, public disclosure, etc. The credit score predicts the likelihood that your future productivity is worthy thereby allowing the lender to hedge risk accordingly.

Computer Enabled Society

If we reconstruct computer enabled society in the same form, we notice some interesting similarities as well as differences.  Instead of 22 financial variables, social variables appear as events demonstrating social, creative, and intellectual capital. Input data comes from Social networking applications such as profiles, blogs, referrals, etc.  Finally, search engine placement registers your social credit score.  Have you Googled your name lately?

As imperfect as this may sound, remember that computer enabled society has not fully developed on the ground. Social Capitalism is in the beginning stages and there is great opportunity in improving this system if we know how it should work because the value of the paradigm, by default, could be in the trillions of dollars.

Next Generation Business Methods

The next great business opportunities will be in the area localizing, mobilizing, organizing, vetting, classification, and normalization social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital.  These elements will contribute to one’s social credit score which buys access to share information and knowledge. Geographic location will become an essential SEO component as diverse communities cluster around technologies and tangential innovations.  Many of the functions that drive a traditional corporation will exist in communities governed by social economic incentives.  As a consequence, not as a cause, social capitalism will reflect social priorities as the term currently implies.

Social Capitalism and The innovation Economy

Social Capitalism fueling an innovation economy may become the most powerful engine of economic growth in human history if structured correctly, and a dud if not.  We are much closer than anyone realizes and the path is becoming increasingly clear. There is great cause for optimism in the next few years of social media development and social capitalism.

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Advertising in the Age of Social Capitalism

The recipe for selling great products to great customers in the age of Social Media resides first in helping people find their highest talent and passion.

The great innovations of our time were created by people doing what they enjoyed most by using their talents to the highest potential.  Disney, Boeing, Apple, Mattel, and nearly every other ground breaking venture had the secret sauce of people doing what they were best at and most passionate about.

Advertising in the Age of Social Capitalism

Computer Enabled Society is in the midst of a struggle to reorganize itself outside of the construct of the traditional corporation. People seek to develop methods and systems that allow for the reallocation of social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital to match a person’s natural talents and passions with those complementary to other people.

If marketers have the foresight and methods to “get ‘em while they’re young”, they certainly also have the foresight and methods to develop ‘em to their highest purchasing potential.  All they need to do is listen and support to the future trends in Social Capitalism.

Instead, mass marketing pays mass money for mass audience from which to draw mass revenues.  As a result, actual products are designed to be marketed and thrown away; not to be particularly useful, productive, or even healthy.  Such unnecessary innovation wastes human effort and natural resources while mass marketing of unnecessary innovation wastes the time and bandwidth of those for whom the product is irrelevant (yes, Spam).  Economies of scale will become liabilities of scale in an Social Capital driven Innovation Economy.

Few realize that advertising can become a highly useful component of the Innovation Economy.  In many professional societies, practitioners look forward to hearing from vendors, educators, and fellow practitioners for trends, news, and developments that can strengthen their community.  Bad products are rejected quickly and good ones are elevated quickly. This is how the great innovations are found. This is where the early adopters congregate. This is where brand loyalty is unyielding. This is where wealth is created.  This is efficiency that society wants and needs.

The Ingenesist Project starts the discussion by specifying the creation of a knowledge inventory in society.  This simple exercise enables communities of practice to form around a set of knowledge attributes.  Advertisers can quickly identify target markets and support the operating costs of these communities in exchange for the bandwidth of the members.   The community will look forward to learning about the advances in the field of their interest and ad copy will become far more useful and efficient to deliver in greater detail.

When communities of practice merge with other communities in the innovation process, the message of the advertiser can be carried far and clear as people share ideas and coordinate activity.  Feedback to the vender is highly qualified thereby creating a virtuous circle of innovation.  In the age of social media, highly targeted advertising is simply more efficient than “bending the herd” in a TV era mass market model.

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Social Media Frequent Flyer Miles

The Internet is a lot like a commercial airplane – it is very useful in transporting us to distant lands but the real work must happen on the ground.  The organization of society at both ends of an Internet destination must be developed if real wealth is to be created. Social Media needs to develop this component at this critical juncture of human history when vast amounts of social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital are being sent to the shores of despair upon Unemployment Air Line.

Computer enabled society:

The great opportunity of our generation in the fair, sustainable, and equitable creation of wealth through innovation in a computer-enabled, open-sourced, and democratic society that can organize its own knowledge in the form of a financial instrument.  The great danger, of course, is if we miss our flight and engender a computer simulated society where it is easier to interact with online community than our own neighbors.  It’s like getting on an airplane for the fine view, good food, and interesting conversation.  Social capital is by far the most powerful force of change and social media must now touch the ground in a meaningful, systemic, repeatable, and scalable manner.

The analogy continues:

The earliest days of aviation were a novelty at best.  Some commercial enterprise emerged in the form of barnstorming, carrying the mail, light cargo, aerial photography, and warfare. Likewise, the evolution of the internet brought us on-line gaming, e-mail, e-commerce, assorted photography, and hacking, etc.  It was not until the invention of municipal airports that the airplane became a true time machine by increasing human productivity and allowing us to see history that would otherwise be unavailable traveling by sea.  The true value of both commercial aviation and social media over “sail mail” is precisely through the increase in human productivity to transfer information to the ground.

Three Web Applications:

First, social media needs to develop a knowledge inventory system by geographic areas.  Second, Social Media needs a search engine at a local level that combines knowledge assets to form “strategic” social networks that can execute a specific business plan at reduced risk; cooking the “secret sauce”.  Third; an Innovation Bank must “pull” knowledge surplus and “pull” knowledge deficits together from diverse communities.  These three applications will provide everyone with the tools needed to create wealth in their communities.

Social Media has the potential to become the airport of the Internet Transportation System.  Nothing meaningful can happen until the rubber meets the tarmac.  So, let’s start building runways.

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Options, Options, What Are My Options?

In finance, an option is the right, without the obligation, of taking a financial position some time in the future.  As with any financial term, options are associated with “code speak” such as: volatility, exercise, strike, call, put, etc., glazing over many an eye.  At the same time, people want, buy, and trade options all day long in everyday life without even knowing it.  Options have value; otherwise people would not want them.

The ROI model of valuation fails when applied to social media.  The number of hits per ad dollar just does not translate to brand loyalty or scale into rivers of cash flow.  There is little surprise that corporations have great difficulty socializing because they simply don’t exist, except as a folder labeled “ROI” in the filing cabinet of an attorney in Bermuda.  In fact, losing control of the message makes for an expensive funeral in that same filing cabinet.  The Social Media industry is trying to live in the ROI structure and struggling to create revenue.

The cardinal rule of business is to collect assets and shed liabilities.  A “right” is an asset while an “obligation” is a liability.  An option is an asset without the liability, to make a decision some time in the future.  As such, options favor long term planning and strategic nurturing rather than short term profit taking of the ROI model. Asian countries and corporations set a good example of buying options in the future through product quality, education, and economic patience.  American corporations should do the same if they hope to benefit from social media.

People do not want ROI, they want options.  They want the option to separate peers from mentors from friends from family.  They want the option to experience before buying.  People want the option to meet their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs.  They want the option to be anonymous or public in their interaction.  They want the option to collaborate and support others.  They want the option to overcome physical barriers.

People want to meet new people, get new ideas, and hold the option to act on those new ideas or collect on past ideas shared with others.  If they exercise an option and discover another along the way, they want the option to pursue many options to meet a changing market. If they create something in one market, they want the option to apply it to adapt it and access other markets.  If they help someone else up the ladder, they want an option to access what that person, in turn, has created from their help. If they make a friend, they want the option of meeting their new friend’s friends.

Likewise, when people are in trouble, they will turn to their collection of options and start exercising them as society has for millenia.  The great financial transformation will occur when on-line society gets threaded into the fabric of off-line society through the trade of options.  This is the area that needs to develop so that all the pieces can fall into place.  This may in fact become the lasting legacy of the financial meltdown.

Options can be the traded like money throughout and across on-line and off-line social networks if there were a way to keep track of them.  While The Ingenesist Project specifies promising strategies for trading options in a social network with varying levels of practicality, we can say with great confidence that it this next paradigm of economic development will never happen with an ROI mentality.

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Social Media; The Opportunity of a Century

The Perfect Storm:

We are at an historic time in human history; one that may never repeat itself again. The current financial crisis may provide just enough disruption for a completely new economic paradigm to emerge; the Innovation Economy.  We cannot squander this moment arguing over common logon for our Twitter and Facebook profiles; a far greater integration is required from Social Media.

Advertising is not the correct revenue model.

It is astonishing that Social Media, in general, has not figured out how to make money.  Social Media IS money.  All wealth on Earth was created from the social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital of people – wealth creation is already crowd sourced.  Now, there is an opportunity for Social Media to harness this engine of economic growth and wealth creation – if they could only see it.

The problem is simple: Globalization is proceeding as if economic growth can occur before technological change. Some time in the past, we got these two things up mixed. It does not take money to make money; it takes innovation to make money.  Technological change MUST ALWAYS happen before real economic growth can occur.  Anything else is a transfer of wealth, not the creation of wealth. All that is unsustainable today – the economy, the environment, natural resources, energy – is due to this itsy bitsy anomaly of current market economics.   Today, we can easily correct this little flaw with almost a flip of a switch – but the window of opportunity will be short – and we need to be clever.

The idea that human knowledge is tangible and behaves individually and collectively like a financial instrument is still considered impossible.  The ability to place a market value on the social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital of a team, community, or geographic population of people – let alone a social network – has never been accomplished.  This idea remains the Holy Grail of finance and one that Social Media is uniquely positioned to capture.  If the finance industry can invent “tangible derivatives” out of thin air paper, then we ought to be able to do the same with knowledge assets that live and breathe tangibly all around us.

If it looks like money, it will behave like money, guaranteed:

First, we need to build a knowledge inventory system that includes everyone; and which can be anonymously codified and amalgamated with logic in machine readable format (the Universal Decimal Classification System is a good candidate). Second, we need to sample our inventory in a community using the proverbial “Bell Curve”. Third, we need to develop a search engine that returns the probability that a strategic combination of knowledge assets can execute a given objective. Fourth, we need an innovation Bank that will “pull” knowledge surplus and “pull” knowledge deficits together from diverse communities.   (Please see the IEc101 at https://ingenesist.com)

This should not sound too weird; it is the same game that Wall Street plays.  The switch is flipped when we engage our innovation system with the financial system.

Go where the money is:

Social Media is perfectly positioned to develop these features in their products and in our communities. We first must understand that innovation is predictable.  We may not be able to say exactly where the innovation will lead, but we can be sure that if we place a group of strategically diversified persons in a room, innovation will happen.  If the fact of innovation is predictable, risks related to the invented can be pooled, morphed, or diversified.  If risk can be diversified, it can be hedged to zero.  If innovation has zero risk, Wall Street will salivate to issue “innovation bonds” to finance diverse communities of practice.  If innovation capital is inexpensive and accessible, a great amount of innovation will occur.  The anomaly of capital markets can be reversed, and the result will be sustainable economic growth.

Naturally, the compensation structure will be in the form of dividends, both financial and in social welfare.  New corporations will emerge and the old corporations will become more efficient. What is invented will tend to reflect social priorities rather than today’s short term Wall Street priorities.   America must innovate at an intense and sustained rate in order to compensate for the imbalance of debt economics that has been created in its absence.  Social Media can be, and must be, the infrastructure upon which an Innovation Economy is built.  Again, this opportunity is staring us straight in the eye.  This is the conversation that must be having today if we will meet the challenges of tomorrow.

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Social Media; A Public Innovation System

In order to restructure our financial system; we first need to restructure our innovation system.  ALL of the top ten reasons for business failure are due to a lack of knowledge, not a lack of money.

Top 10 reasons why businesses fail:

1.    Lack of an adequate, viable business plan
2.    Insufficient sales to sustain business
3.    Poor marketing plan: unappealing product, poor customer identification, incorrect pricing and lackluster promotion
4.    Inadequate capital, misuse of capital and poor cost control
5.    Poor management skills: lack of delegation, leadership and/or control
6.    Lack of experience and knowledge
7.    Lack of managerial focus/commitment
8.    Poor customer service
9.    Inadequate human resource management
10.    Failure to properly use professional advice: i.e. accounting, legal, financial, etc.

Lack of a viable business plan is an act of negligence where research, scenarios, and assumptions have not been tested.  Market ignorance is not an excuse nor is the failure to know one’s customer. Death by poor marketing plan is knowledge deficiency related to product appeal, customer identification, pricing structure, and lackluster promotion.  Obviously, one needs to know how to manage a company in order to be focused, let alone correctly estimate capital needs. Lack of customer service knowledge is deadly in the age of social media. Inadequate HR is an oxymoron – if it’s inadequate, it’s not a resource – human or otherwise.  Finally, failure to listen to knowledgeable people is ego driven irrationality.

The financial system is not the only problem; the innovation system is a crucial element. Information, knowledge and innovation, by any definition, are profoundly and inseparably connected.  A failure in one kills the other two.  So, just because an entrepreneur does not have the knowledge, does not mean it the ‘knowledge’ fails to exist – it simply means that entrepreneur failed to find it.

So where is the knowledge? Unfortunately, there is no public knowledge inventory – people do not know what each other knows.  There is no website where that people can go search for all 90th percentile social media experts living in zip code 06776, let alone build a dedicated local management team.  There is no way that anyone can assemble the knowledge needed to execute a business plan with a known probability of success given the information available.  As such, there is no way to finance public innovation.

Insurance companies can tell you the probability that you will die exactly on your 80th birthday, but we cannot estimate the probability that a business will be successful.  Nothing has more variables that human physiology, yet it is predictable and business success probability is not.  Why can’t this be fixed?

If we could identify, integrate, and predict public information, knowledge and innovation, we could diversify risk exposures away.  With risk exposures managed, we could insure start-ups risks.  With start-up risk eliminated, we can sell innovation bonds at, say, 6% to fund the extraordinary rate of public innovation that we need to support our debt and pressing social liabilities.   If the innovation bond returns a modest 20%, human productivity, by definition, has increased by 20%.  A 20% growth in human productivity is a 20% growth in an economy.  Again, financial system is not the only problem; the innovation system – or lack of an innovation system – is the problem.  Perhaps oversimplified, but this is an astonishing omission from the national dialog on the financial crisis.

The emergence of Social Media technology presents an extraordinary opportunity to organize a knowledge inventory outside the construct of a corporation and marry it to the financial system, much like a corporation.  Knowledge tangibility must be the most important “innovation” in the pipeline today if we expect to meet the crushing challenges that await us.  Just because we cannot predict innovation does not mean it cannot be done – it just means that we do not know how… yet. This is not about inventing a new currency, it is about the public taking control of the old one. We, the people, don’t deserve to lose this game; join The Ingenesist Project and help build a sustainable Innovation Economy.

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Social Media; The Central Bank for Knowledge Assets?

It is very interesting to watch Social Media follow familiar trajectories as earlier paradigms in finance.  I see many social media platforms struggling to make human knowledge tangible in their respective markets.  The challenge is so simple, yet so complex.  Let the litmus test for knowledge tangibility be as follows; “Can you buy groceries with it?”

The Romans Empire had a similar problem; how to sack Europe and bring home the booty.  The only thing most people had at the time were sheep, fish, and wine.  So the emperor created a coin that represented a peasant’s productivity in raising sheep, catching fish, and making wine – and it was a lot easier to collect taxes.  The conquest of a continent has far more to do with the social acceptance of the currency than the actual pillaging – pillaging, after all, would be counter productive in a social network.

Today the dollar also represents human productivity – except a ‘necessary flaw’ was introduced to finance innovation leading to fantastic worldwide economic growth from which many people benefit greatly.  Now, this flaw threatens to topple the whole system.  Money still represents productivity, except it now represents future productivity allocated to paying debt.  As long as innovation increases fast enough to outpace debt, everything is OK.  Problems happen when debt exceeds our structural ability to innovate.

We do not need to restructure the financial system – we need to restructure the innovation system.  The human race is exceedingly fortunate that the end game for debt economics will happen at the exact moment in history that the technology required to start a new game of sustainable innovation economics has arrived.   If done correctly, Social Media (computer enabled society) can become the most important human invention since to the printing press.

Today, human knowledge, in the form of social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital, is captured and hidden inside corporations.  Each corporation has its own business plan, lexicon, culture, organization, structure, and processes by which human knowledge is exchanged in the creation of a “product”.  Outside the corporation, however, true knowledge assets are either invisible, incomplete, or only appear as a proxy of the corporation.  This leads to stagnation, silos, mis-allocation, vulnerability to external shock, and greatly limits the diversity needed for sustainable innovation.

In the 1700’s Banks printed their own currency – these were called “bank notes” because they were little notes that declared who had a surplus and who had a deficit of money relative to the bank.  People would trade these notes in society to purchase things, buy feed or seed, and to keep track of things.  Everyone had a job to do and the general flow of these notes is what “incorporated” townships. Unfortunately, such banking also lead to industrial stagnation, silos of wealth, and lack of diversification leading to corruption, bank failures, and ‘bottle necks’ in the flow of capital.

Barely 150 years ago, the U.S. government established a central banking system with common currency, common practices, common accounting, and common regulation. The system became much more efficient, diversified, and accessible across the landscape.  The industrial revolution, manufacturing revolution, lots of wars, the era of information, and the Internet Industries were all financed through a central banking system.  Human productivity increased at a tremendous rate and the relative wealth that we enjoy today is a tangible result of innovation.

Now the Pied Piper has come to take the children to sea.  The banking system needs to invent new, exotic, and increasingly risky financial instruments for trading your productivity in order to keep the game alive.  Meanwhile, the tangibility of human knowledge is stuck in an 18th century banking system.  There is no common knowledge inventory, there is no common accounting practice for skills and abilities, there is no way to measure social capital and creative capital – the system is too biased toward “intellectual capital” measured by Ivy League degrees and access to wealth.  Knowledge assets are not tangible, organized, classified, or collected in a society in any structured way.  “Can you buy groceries with it yet”?

With the emergence of Social Media, we have an extraordinary opportunity to make knowledge tangible outside the construct of a corporation much like banks notes became tangible outside the construct of a single township.  There are vast and crushing problems in the world today.  The only way out of this mess is to massively increase the rate of innovation in society.  Like off-shore drilling – vast wealth in the form of social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital lays hidden beneath thousands of layers of philosophical limestone.  Social Media and the first amendment = drill baby, drill.

The only thing separating us from a debt economy and an innovation economy is social agreement. The philosophical chasm holding us back is about to be broken by The Ingenesist Project: In the current paradigm, money is backed by future productivity allocated to pay off today’s debt.  In the social media paradigm; money will be backed by future productivity created by today’s innovation.  At the end of the day money still represents productivity.  The conquest of a continent has far more to do with the acceptance of the currency than the actual pillaging.  Hey, why not buy groceries with it?

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Tangible Knowledge; Options and Contingencies

In order for knowledge to become a tangible asset, we need to come to grips with the fact that human knowledge is fluid and mobile, whereas a condo or a piece of machinery is static.  A machine can’t walk away if it does not like their management.

With knowledge assets, the typical “Return on Investment” (ROI) model breaks down.  When assets have a mind of their own, there is no reliable way to calculate ROI without somehow corralling the asset inside some form of closed contract, a corporation, political system, social class, or by introducing barriers to exit, etc.  In the modern financial system, human assets are held tangible by debt obligations – today many people go to work in servitude of debt, not in creation of new ideas.

An option* is the right, without the liability of obligation, to exercise a decision in the future.  Human interaction accommodates this valuation model quite readily; it’s called free-will.  Therefore the option valuation model is an adequate method to assess knowledge assets as a means of making them tangible.

The value of a financial option can be calculated if one knows the following 5 variables: The asset price, the strike price, the date of maturity, the risk free interest rate, and the volatility – or, the odds on the bet.  By contrast, the ROI model requires us to know basically the same things; the cost today, the strike price (future sale price), the date of maturity, the risk free interest rate, and the probability of success – or variance of the expectation.  The equation is just a little different.

Individually, human behavior often appears chaotic and irrational, but in aggregate, we know that human behavior is really quite predictable.  If you put similar people together, you get similar ideas.  If you put extremely different people together, you get extremely unpredictable ideas.  If you put strategic combinations of people together, you should be able to predict the variance of the ideas.  This is all the information we need to place a value on our bet.   If human behavior is predictable, it is tangible.

Suppose we enter into a ROI venture and it fails miserably; the market was wrong or the product was wrong, or the people were wrong, etc.  Even though the investment failed, the knowledge accumulated from the attempt can be exercised in many other projects in the future. While the Patent may turn out to be worthless, the knowledge gained by the team can be used over and over again.  Each person gains a statistical data point in their experience set with which to assess comparable situations in the future.  This is an option and this option has value.  If the team were disbanded without somehow capturing the inventory of new knowledge assets, a very valuable set of options becomes squandered.

Some companies such as Google, try not to kill an idea, they morph the idea into something else.  Free-range knowledge tangibility must achieve those same objectives.  Today we see people building networks on Linkedin – this activity resembles the collection of options on future opportunities.  People post on social media to see and be seen by other knowledge assets as a means of collecting more options for their careers or actions. People would not be doing it if there was no intrinsic value.  The next big leap will happen when knowledge tangibility is married to the financial system through the direct valuation and capitalization of options.  Did I mention there is an equation for that?

The Ingenesist Project specifies a method and system for knowledge inventory that would produce a variance for knowledge assets.  The Percentile Search Engine would pull knowledge assets in combination that diversify variance into a highly predictable surplus assets and deficit assets.   The Innovation Bank would match most worthy surplus to most worthy deficit.  As such, the Innovation Economy itself is now a most worthy option for supporting a feeble financial system.

The ROI model is the mother of all squandered knowledge assets – the very same assets that are really purchased on a project, successful or not, are often willfully abandoned.  All of the parameters of an option valuation model can now be met with social media and The Ingenesist Project integration methods. Free-range knowledge assets can then be directly financed toward business objectives.  The idea of an innovation economy based on knowledge tangibility is well within our grasp technologically, culturally, and systematically.

Social media has an astonishing opportunity to integrate social, creative, and intellectual knowledge assets to trade that single most important part of the puzzle, tangible knowledge assets.  I suspect that this outcome will depend on whether these new tools are treated to an ROI valuation model or on an options valuation model.

* Italic used for clarity

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The Tangibility of Knowledge

Knowledge Tangibility should be the most important conversation in Social Media circles given the current financial situation in America.

I lived through financial devaluation in another country and the effects were crushing: after the run on the banks, there will be a run on Walmart.  People will buy TVs, small appliances, shoes, and useful stuff that will hold more value tomorrow that they cost today.  These items may become a de facto currency of trade.  Americans will be astonished by how fast a devaluation event plays out; hours and days, not months or years.  When things settle down, the government will retire the old dollar and introduce a new currency at an exchange of, say, 1 megabuck equals 1000 old dollars.  Then the chips are cleared, assets are transferred, and the same game can start all over again.

The difference is that for the first time in history, there is a window of opportunity for social media technology to break this cycle. Please let me explain:

Suppose that a BMW costs $50,000 dollars and a KIA costs $10,000 dollars.  These prices reflect the quantity and quality of the car in terms of availability and popular amenities such as, handling, road noise, comfort, status, etc. Suppose the government introduces a new currency called the “megabuck”.  Suppose the government pegs the megabuck to cars saying that all cars will have a value of 30,000 megabucks. Since these cars are not equal, people will begin trading; the BMW will be bid up to 50,000 megabucks and the Kia will be bid down to 10,000 megabucks based on supply and demand – right back where they started.

Admittedly an oversimplification, but the point is does not matter what you call the currency – the most important thing is the quantity and quality of the asset.  This brings us back to the idea of knowledge tangibility.

Suppose that, on average, 1 hour of human labor is worth 20 megabucks.  As above, hard labor will be bid up while soft labor would be bid down.  The same is not really true with knowledge because knowledge is invisible and it can’t be counted with bricks or bushels.  There is no knowledge inventory in America’s communities.  Therefore, there is no way to establish supply and demand for knowledge assets.  People in a community do not know what other people in the community know. This is where social networks will make a huge difference.

Human knowledge, if formatted correctly, would make an excellent asset upon which to peg a currency. Today, accountants say that human knowledge is “intangible” but social media demonstrates otherwise; human knowledge is simply invisible – hidden inside corporations under the thumb of Wall Street. Social media demonstrates that knowledge assets are itching to be release to the public domain in a highly tangible manner.  Believe it or not, we are now 95% of the way toward real knowledge tangibility today.   We should be very excited about this because everything changes.

Like the example with the cars, we need to have a comprehensive inventory of the knowledge assets in our communities so that they can be strategically combined into productive organizations.  This inventory must be formatted in terms of quantity and quality and include all knowledge living including social, creative, and intellectual capital.  If done correctly, it will not matter what happens to the dollar or what currency is used as a scorecard, the value of human knowledge assets will remain intact.

Again, the value is in the asset, not the currency – it is in you, me, and our diverse communities who will favor community priorities rather than Wall Street priorities. This is how where we will find equity, sustainability, and fairness in a capitalist system.

The Ingenesist Project has specified exactly how to create knowledge tangibility in a capitalist model using 3 simple web applications for Social Networks; a Knowledge Inventory, a Percentile Search Engine, and an Innovation Bank. Please read the intro and the articles on page IEc101.  If you agree, please pass it on.  If you do not agree, please help us make it better.  If you don’t understand, email me. This needs to happen fast and unfortunately nobody will do it for us – we must do it ourselves.

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The Balance Sheet for Knowledge Assets

Innovation economics has a way of forcing us to look at the mirror image of conventional wisdom.  This article will look at knowledge assets as they might appear on an accounting balance sheet.  You may be surprised at what happens at the bottom line.

Wall Street will often reward a company that has a large backlog of orders. This can appear in the eyes of most observers as an asset. After all, who would not want a backlog of orders?  However, in the world of social media, a huge backlog causes a serious problem – it represents commitments made that have not yet been delivered. An unfulfilled promise in a social network is a liability and not an asset.  By extension, a backlog in an innovation economy is a liability and not an asset (note: climate change).

Applying conventional wisdom to an innovation economy, we find that most companies have an excellent inventory of the “liability” but a poor inventory of the “asset” that will execute those promises. All of their plans, specifications, blueprints, job descriptions, policies and procedures, etc., are liabilities in an innovation economy because these define the promise that is unfulfilled, not the asset that will fulfill them.

Until recently, companies assumed that the right knowledge assets will always be available – an assumption that for a long time has limited the level of productivity that humans can achieve, specifically, the sustainability of natural resources. The absence of a knowledge inventory limits the complexity of problems that humans can solve much like industry was limited to custom machinery before Eli Whitney demonstrated the concept of interchangeable parts less than 200 years ago.

Further, if the product line is expected to have a life cycle of more than a few years, the knowledge inventory must extend beyond the doors of the company and into the surrounding community.  Therefore, the knowledge inventory must take on the taxonomy of the community, not the taxonomy of the corporation such as skill codes, levels, titles, etc. The requirement is now clearly in the domain of social networks.  Yet, I still hear grumblings in the blog sphere that social networks cannot be monetized – nothing should be further from the truth.

So, let’s talk about the bottom line.  For example, Boeing announced today that their greatest future challenge would be the availability of engineers. Boeing has a market capitalization of $34B and a $300B backlog.  Money has a 10:1 multiplier as it travels through and economy.  For a balanced accounting statement, what would be the real value of a social network that can capture the correct knowledge inventory to support Boeing; 34B, 300B, or 3T?

In general, valid estimates of the bottom line can vary by 2 orders of magnitude depending on the point of view of Wall Street, corporate management, or the social network community.  Who would be the better steward?

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Social Enterprise; Can Innovation Be Manufactured?

Manufacturing is the use of tools and labor to make things for use or for sale.  When I think of manufacturing, I see images of machines spinning out high precision components into colored inventory buckets that are transported to clean areas to be precisely combined with other precious components creating some magnificent device such as an aircraft, computer, or medical CAT scan machine.  Each device is a product of countless human interactions.

Each little piece is designed, discussed, and depicted with great care and precision so that it fits perfectly with the next piece.  Everything about each part is planned long in advance; the composition of the material, the tolerances of all dimensions, and the strength/weight/wear characteristics.  However, each piece alone has little value without the other pieces.  Yet, if one piece fails the whole machine can fail.  When the machine has completed its service life – those beautiful, intricate, and worthy creations of human interactions are simply discarded.

Since the invention of the cotton gin, the economic growth resulting from the human interaction involved in precision component making (literally and figuratively) is undeniable.  Until the era of Social Networking, however, few could envision that human interactions are themselves components of an invisible inventory. Each element of human interaction is precisely honed from some invisible raw material by social machinery and deposited into colorful garments and transported to clean areas where they combine with other precious components creating some magnificent device such as an airplane, computer, or medical CAT scan machine.  When the machine is scrapped, the product of those human interactions lives on…but where and how?

The greatest constraint to the emergence of an innovation economy is the invisibility of knowledge assets; social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital.  We have an inventory of every nut, rivet, and panel on an airplane, but not the knowledge asset that created things.  It is like society is keeping a big secret from itself.  This is the great opportunity for Social Media.

People are still asking “where is the money in all of this social media stuff?” The answer is “everywhere – the door is unlocked, but the lights are off”.  The irony regarding the visibility of knowledge assets is that they lay right in front of us but we refuse to see the obvious.  All we need to do is switch on the lights. Until we can inventory knowledge assets outside the construct of a corporation, social networks cannot themselves become the corporations of the future.

Can innovation be manufactured?  Of course, with the right tools, innovation can do whatever it wants.

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