The Next Economic Paradigm

Tag: wikipedia

Decentralized CRM With Curiosumé

(Photo: New York Times)

Modern CRM (Customer Relationship Management) emerged from the boiler rooms of corporate sales departments. They needed a way to keep track of contacts, leads, calls, and ping schedules.  Soon they added client information like DOB, Spouses name, neighborhood news, etc.  The customer responded remarkably well, in fact, perhaps too well – they started asking for things like better service, warranty claims, and “can I get that in purple”.

Salespersons, being so closely tied to the revenue, began telling the service department that they are choking revenue,  and telling the warranty department when customers are defecting, and telling engineering to introduce new features.  They got away with it because they had management support as a revenue driver.  Pretty soon CRM systems began migrating across the enterprise evolving along the way. Ironically, CRM now finds itself losing touch with the customer despite the ever increasing amount of data that now populates the hit sheets.

Recently, we were asked to consider scenarios for Curiosumé applications in a CRM role in the financial industry. There are several important features of Curiosumé that can reconnect the customer to the enterprise.

Top level ontology in the commons
Instead of controlling people’s information, set it free and watch where the client leads you.  When all market channels pull their information from the same network of nodes and branches, they can always be current and synchronized. When the client adds information to the commons, this becomes available to the vendor outside of a firewall eliminating many security issues.  You don’t necessarily need (or want) to know the ID of the client in order to serve them better.

Anonymity layer / autonomous matching:
AUPOT (Anonymous Until Point of Transaction) allows clients to deploy anonymous personas so that they will be more willing to;

  • reveal true intentions to the commons,
  • perform their own pre-analysis in the commons
  • increase their insights and contribute that to the commons.

Customer Controls Their Data:
Help the client own and control their own engagement data.  Give them the same tools and opportunities to experiment as researchers as the Big Data wonks have.  Allow them to delete, save, edit or have as many different personas as they want. Let them deploy and retract personas as a way of finding you.  A better and more efficient relationship will emerge between both sides of a transaction.

User interface layer:
Instead of leading your client like cattle through an arbitrary ontology tree, show them photographs that corresponds to nodes in the common ontology.  These can then be matched algorithmically to advisors, products, or different departments in the firm, in real time.   In essence, you can create a multi-agent algorithmic game in a user interface that could be fun, engaging, and sticky as heck.

Advisor interface:
When a client chooses to engage the advisor or a product or a transaction,  they can submit their persona into the algorithm to select specialized advisors or a team of advisors. Only at the point of mutual acceptance, both players cross the firewall and engage in honest, trusting commerce. Layers and layers of bureaucracy, vetting, and security breaches can be eliminated until the actual exchange is made.

(Photo: The Philadelphia Orchestra)

Powerful Feature:
One of the most powerful and least recognized features of Curiosumé is the ability to constrain a “score” to a number or a range. One reason for this is to create imbalance around the mean – when the system is not balanced, it can never be static and will always have some movement (regression toward the mean).  It will become largely self-managing, self centering, and even a little joyous.

For example: if we constrain the client to having a Curiosumé score of zero; that means that for the total of all (+) sigmas, they must also accumulate an equal and opposite total of  (-) sigmas such that their net total is zero, in order to pass “go”. When we lay this back on to the top level ontology (Wikipedia), we can find a series of paths that unite the (+) sigmas to the (-) sigmas.  This path tells us a GREAT deal about where the client wants to go.  Likewise an older client may prefer a net (+) portfolio where a younger client may prefer a net (-) portfolio.  Decentralized CRM with Curiosumé can also be applied to risk pooling in the same manner. The deviation s from the mean and resulting movements are precisely how we would price the derivatives of intangibles, i.e. tangibles.

Outcome:
Decentralized CRM with Curiosumé is readily ready to happen. We know that people, advisors, and products can be brought together in personal and emotional engagement when they intersect paths of common interest. This is the weakness of both the barter system AND modern technological Capitalism  If we can envision interests flowing dynamically along vectors, we will have the ability to align human incentives and the markets that depend on them.

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The Future Is Common Knowledge

Image Credit

Few people recognize the true economic potential of Wikipedia. Obviously, Wikipedia is an important resource for individuals and profit making companies.  It would take Billions of dollars to recreate it from scratch. But the true value of Wikipedia does not end here.

Wikipedia is a really huge set of interconnecting nodes – a massive dynamic database in the commons. When two points are connected, the magnitude and direction of the resulting line provides information about the data and proximity to other data.  Wikipedia is a venerable roadmap of connections between significant people, places, things, and ideas. Not unlike the Facebook social graph, Wikipedia in aggregate is a knowledge graph of humanity.  It is therefore as perfect a representation of humanity because it was created by humanity.

Mass Encryption

One of the more effective ways to encrypt data is to hide it among other data. In fact, your personal knowledge graph, stripped of  personally identifiable information can be hidden – like a needle in a haystack – among the wikipedia knowledge graph.  Your knowledge graph can then extrapolated along the nodes, edges, and paths of Wikipedia to draw inferences, make decisions, or set priorities for yourself and your interaction with the community.  It’s like your own private Big Data engine that only you can see.

The idea behind Curiosumé is to develop that vehicle from which a person can interpret actionable information when they overlay a persona (or Proxy) of themselves on the Wikipedia commons.  When many people overlay their personas to the Public Wikipedia Haystack, they can specify criteria out of nodes and branches of the wikipedia knowledge graph to find each other, to work together, to learn and teach.

Enter Block Chain

Each owner holds a private key in a cryptographic vault to their proxy that they can share, rent, or retract from others. The Private key is the only way to associate the owner with their proxy and with the commons. Mutual private key exchange will define a market for intangible assets among owners of such assets.  This exchange device would be ideally suited for a cryptographic platform such as Maidsafe protocol or Bitcoin Protocol.

Connections, intersections, and resultant “vectors” will reveal patterns from which decisions can be made.  The future economy may include the exchange of private keys.

Level Playing Field

As long as proxies – or personas – are anonymized, it would be OK for everyone to have access to them in the commons.  In fact, the quantity and the quality of the personas in the commons for a community or location could underwrite the currency of that community.  Everyone would have the ability to test their persona in the public domain upon any market to reveal their greatest economic potential.  Such a community currency would have a relative value to other communities not unlike, say, Forex.

The community can even test their own combined personas against a host of scenario proxies such as job proxies, investment proxies, etc., all without committing personal information. However, when two or more parties engage in transaction and/or interface with a regulatory agency, they will need to reveal their private key in order for a transaction to pass a pre-established compliance proxy that is also comprised of nodes and branches in the commons.

The Art of War

It would be very difficulty for people to violate another person because they will need access to the other person’s private key as well as a change in the commons in order to formulate a deception. If they modify the commons, they will in fact reveal themselves as a transaction.   If a perpetrator can somehow change the other person’s proxy, then they will notify others connected to that proxy of that change. Further, the perpetrator may be unwittingly doing more harm to themselves than good in their own connection to other proxies when attacking a particular persona – any action, except the truthful action, could have implications that are unknowable.

As such, there is little incentive to cheat.

Cloud Wars  

As such, any disputes will be fought in the commons and not at each individual node where the world engages in wars, competition, and oppression today. Wars would be fought in the info commons rather than being shrouded in the fog of ground ops.

The Future of Common Knowledge

 The future of common knowledge is the “commons”.  If every person, corporation, or institution were to index to a commons based data source, we could all observe each other while maintaining our privacy.  Economic scenarios could be run without expending money.  Disputes could be handled in the cloud.  The maintenance of the commons could become a new form of governance.

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Means and Methods of the Curiosumé DApp

The Mechanics of the Curiosumé DApp are extremely simple. In fact, perhaps the greatest challenge of building the application will be to truncate the features of Curiosumé to the simplest functional form.

Means and Methods of the Curiosumé DApp

The only thing that Curiosumé is really supposed to accomplish is convert a résumé, CV, or project description from an analog form to a digital form so that the accounting, production, storage, and exchange of intangible assets can be machine enabled in a meaningful and valuable way. Centralized applications such as Facebook and Google perform this job quite effectively within their fortress for sale to 3rd parties, Curiosumé will do the same for decentralized applications between two parties only where value is retained by the creators and owners of the data.

An analog to digital converter for knowledge assets.

Curiosumé is a “writer” that is given away free to the Commons, open sourced, and decentralized. Ideally, an independent instance of the totality of Curiosumé could reside on every device. Applications that import Curiosumé data are called “readers”. Readers will be developed by entrepreneurs to accelerate any number of business models that are otherwise unviable in the current economic paradigm or simply under-performing due to the friction of the current economic model. Reader application may be for-profit giving the network an incentive to maintain Curiosumé. How an entrepreneur uses Curiosumé could be a trade secret rendering many patents obsolete.   These Reader Applications may include Decentralization schemes (DApps), P2P exchanges, and community cooperatives.

As such, the preferred interface between the reader and the writer will be likely be more suited to the MaidSafe protocol of secure P2P exchange of data. This would be similar to other intangible assets such as music, art, and literary works. It is easy to imagine a persona of one’s life story to be a real-time literary work – if not, then it should be.

Converting knowledge assets from analog to digital form:

Step one: User tags themselves with URL’s from Wikipedia articles that best represent intentions to interact with their community.

Step two: User self-selects their placement on a spectrum comprised of endpoints: student of that content, and teacher of that content (Note; midway across the spectrum corresponds to degrees of collaboration).

Step three: Curiosumé creates a digital persona in a specific form

Step four: Export persona to “reader” applications for analysis and processing.

This is the extent of the functional requirements of Curiosumé.

Operational Requirements:

The operational requirements of the application are somewhat more complex. The following six conditions must me secured by the Curiosumé application. If any of these 6 tenets are compromised, the mathematics behind the applications will fail and the intended outcomes will be suboptimal.

1. All public and private Wikis should reconcile upward to a top level Wikipedia entry

2, Rankings must span a non-competitive “student-collaborator-teacher” spectrum

3. Users must be allowed to self-select their placement on the spectrum.

4. The data format must be uniform as;

5. Persona must be indelible to anyone except the owner.

6. Interactions must be anonymous until the point of transaction

These 6 Tenets are unpacked a bit more below:

The Calculus of Curiosumé 

In this form, clean data may be easily normalized for statistical inference while remaining anonymous until an actual transaction of personal data may be negotiated on a P2P basis.  In essence, the criteria described here will produce extraordinarily useful data.

Rule 1: This rule secures a commons based knowledge inventory.  Much like air, water, and Earth, the knowledge assets in the commons are visible components from which useful things will be produced as regulated by supply and demand for the same components.

Rule 2: Students and teachers do not normally compete, rather, in the case of Curiosumé DApp, they represent “supply” and “demand” in a proto-economy. Collaborators represent factors of production in an economy where complementary knowledge can replicate a iterate – these are the engines that create value – this is the mining function.  These data will form a bell curve providing statistical inference to the commons where social value is mined in aggregate.

Rule 3:  The process of self-selection will be deeply personal to all participants and represents the individual mining of value for deposit in the new bank of intangible assets.  All this “mining” can be measured to form the basis of generalized reciprocity of social crypto-currencies.

Rule 4: The common format of of the Curiosumé output function will assure the ability to mix, match, exchange, discover, or test any scenario of social production imaginable.

Rule 5: Gives each person ownership of their data.

Rule 6: Not unlike Craigslist, anonymity until point of transaction is important for allowing people to view the public dataset and test their own participation to find opportunities for productive interaction.

Reader DApps:

When a match is made, a transaction can be negotiated.  However, this functionality is beyond the scope of the Curiosumé writer.  Instead, an innumerable amount of Readers will be developed by entrepreneurs to collect, form, and test scenarios negotiating the decentralized production of all useful things.

Innumerable use cases will create moderate generalized disruption across the current economic paradigm until a tipping point is reached where factors of production will flip from finite tangible to infinite intangible basis of account. Social priorities regarding what is invented and produced will be altered in favor of shared asset preservation rather than private asset consumption. Income equality, by design, will be normalized.  Collaboration will replace competition eliminating the need for over reaching controls and associated force.

 

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The New Definition Of Social Capitalism

About 3 months ago, I received a cryptic email from what sounded like a war-weary Wikipedia Editor pinned down in the trenches by enemy cross-fire.  His message was stark;  Wikipedia will delete “Social Capitalism”, you are in the best position to save it”.

Since the dawn of Social Media, many people in the Social Capital domain, including myself, had been contributing references, material, ideas, and theoretical constructs to the doomed Wikipedia article in naive optimism that Social Capitalism may indeed be a new form of social organization.  So, upon receiving the desperate plea from the front lines of Wikipedia D-day, I jumped in and submitted argument after argument to an already formidable defense deploring the powerful Wikipedia Editors to preserve the article, the idea, the possibility…

But alas, we failed.  Perhaps we did not have proper academic credentials. Maybe we were not widely cited by important people. Our oppressors eventually provided a weak explanation related to social systems and economics, etc., but in retrospect, I think the real problem was that we were trying to define something that did not yet exist despite nearly 30 million Google search returns.

I have to admit that I agree with the Wikipedia editors. In reviewing that experience recently, I turned to the definition for “Capitalism (disambiguation)” in Wikipedia:

Wikipedia defines Capitalism as an “economic and social system in which the means of production are privately controlled”. 

Factors of Production (from classical economics) are presumed to be something like “land, labor, and capital”.  Now, consider that modern day factors of production are increasingly cited as: “Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and Creative Capital” of people and their relationships.  After all, these are the assets that are deployed in order to produce the proverbial “basket of goods” upon which most global currencies are compared.  

This is not trivial. Since these modern factors of production exist between the ears of each individual person, they are, by definition “privately controlled” and readily exchanged for economic outcomes among people in social networks.

If the US Supreme Court agrees that corporations are people, then it is equally valid that people are corporations too. Taken together:

Social Capitalism refers to the economic and social system in which the means of production are social, creative, and intellectual assets.  

However, (and a big however), in order for Social Capitalism to become the dominant form of social organization, quite literally, society must reorganize itself to account for exchange and trade of intangibles. Then, all the decentralized innovations that we call the “Social Capital Domain” can integrate, unify, and dominate. Everything will change.

SEE: Reorganizing For The Era Of Social Capitalism

Perhaps then we’ll finally have a Wikipedia article for Social Capitalism like those clear, present, and magnificently organized warriors behind such economic facts as  Corporate Personhood.

 

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Reorganizing In The Era Of Social Capitalism

apitalism is evolving. Society needs to reorganize itself to trade “abundant intangibles instead of scarce tangibles”.  Then, all the decentralized innovations currently coming online can truly integrate.….and, everything will change.

Reorganizing In The Era Of Social Capitalism:

This 16 minute video describes a method for intangible assets to be made tangible in an accounting system for the purpose of storage, exchange, and creation of new value in communities.

The next step is to create a series of similar videos specifically tailored to each major industry in our economy specifying how Curiosumé would benefit them. That is described in the following document:

Video Proposal

We also seek to reach the community of entrepreneurs who will build the next generation of data visualization tools that will facilitate matching algorithms for communities.

Finally, we will introduce The Value Game and the WIKiD Tools Algorithm with which we may form a new cryptographic currency backed by abundant intangibles rather than scarce disposable tangible assets.

 That is Reorganizing In The Era Of Social Capitalism

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Shutting OFF The Lights On Big Data

Big Data, Bigger Data, Not Neutrality, Mega-Mergers, Election Deform – BIG (fill in the blank)  spells BIG trouble for LITTLE (rest of us).  We don’t stand a chance against the tsunami of surveillance that is barreling our way.  Big Data is becoming it’s own feedback loop and, like shoving a microphone into a stack of tweeters, the noise is deafening.

Nature tells us many things about how an organism responds to externalities.  For example, when a stand of trees encounters an insect infestation, they work in symbiosis with fungi and micro-organisms to amazingly communicate signals across distance and across species to develop compounds to arrest the attack.  Nature collaborates in magnificent ways with often astonishing results – survival of the collaborators.

The entire human organism is in this position today, we cannot attack our own do-loop without also attacking ourselves.  We must adapt a new one.   We must address the perils ahead by organizing ourselves in a radically different manner.  When threatened by inundation, we must also become fluid, mix with the tide, and change its composition from within.

The following presentation was delivered at Seattle University in April 2014.  This presentation demonstrates why – and most importantly –  how we need to re-visualize society, especially our own place in it.  We need to reorganize ourselves as a species to face these powerful new forces that ultimately threaten to smother the knowledge, creativity, and wisdom from our one and only planet.

Our objective with this video is to communicate to all other New Value Movement applications that there is a new form of organization that we can all adapt in order to integrate ourselves in collaboration outside of BIG Data.

Only 20 minutes – be prepared for a mind bender!

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Global Knowledge Asset Inventory

Before I write this blog post, what does this image mean to you?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The God App

David Chacko’s newest mystery novel, The God App, is a story about a detective tracking down the killer of the professor who invented a computer program that anticipates major moves in the financial markets. Whoever holds The God App is far above the law as the people who rule the world come calling for their guaranteed returns. It would seem that the only problem with The God App is for those who don’t have one…sound familiar?

***

If everyone had The God App then no one would have a God App. Today we are at a point where the only way to beat the disease is to lose the patient. As long we are competing with each other, we’ll never figure out how to predict the future, let alone fix it.

First, we seriously need to reorganize ourselves:

Instead of ranking, rating, and organizing each other as winners and losers of things, we need to organize ourselves as students and teachers of things.  This would allow us to exchange value with each other in a pre-dollar proto-economy without necessarily competing with each other.  Teachers would represent supply and students represent demand in a collaboration market.  Here is what the teacher/student scale may look like:

Second, we need to create an inventory

In order to build anything useful or meaningful, we need to have an large inventory of parts that can be easily combined, assembled, exchanged, and inter related.

Today, Wikipedia has grown to become the most comprehensive collection of definitive information about the world around us.  Everyone should rewrite their résumé as a set of Wikipedia URLs that most closely represent their talents, interests, experiences, skills, and abilities.  People will locate their selves on a knowledge graph.

A Wikipedia Cluster Ballcourtesy of Chris Harrison (click to enlarge)

The dimensional résumé:

When we combine Wikipedia Tag with the teacher/student scale, it forms a 2-dimensional array.  This new form of résumé/CV allows communities to store and exchange value among each other.  The CV array may look something like this (etc):

The Personal API

In this 2-dimensional form, everyone would own and control a string of code that represents their willingness and ability to build and collaborate economically in their community.

[tag1](-3), [tag2](+2), [tag3](1), [tag4](-2), [tag5](3),….,etc.  

This string can be processed computationally more like an API than a résumé. Most importantly,  anonymity can be preserved until the point when a transaction will actually take place.

Additionally, people can represent themselves by partial strings to create separate personas. Individual APIs can be combined among many people, and their personas, to create productive teams, communities, and corporations.

Adding dimensions to your API: Attributes such as location, schedule, context, and equipment can be attached in real time or travel dynamically wherever the persona is traveling.

The API Economy

With anonymous source data; everyone can conduct surveys of communities that would likely resemble the proverbial “Bell Curve” or, a normal distribution.  This is important because it would allow everyone the same ability to predict the likelihood that a collection of knowledge assets can execute a particular business plan.  People could see exactly what they need to do next in order to achieve a reliable probability of success in an economy.

Sounds Like Big Brother?

If this scares you, then consider this:  The God App is already here. Everything you do is captured electronically in a very similar form in order to create a predictive profile of you; what you will buy, who you will associate with, who you will vote for, etc.

Political campaigns, advertising agencies, Facebook, Google, Linkedin, corporations, government, Wall Street, and even organized crime (not to be redundant) use big data to gerrymander their way into your productivity potential.  The difference is that 99% are excluded from the predictive process, shackled behind the curtain, detached from their hopes, dreams, and intensions…mindlessly posting résumés, guessing, reacting, etc.

And the Good Lord said unto thee….

Hey dumb ass, wake up.  You can cut them all off at the nub with a simple app that a bunch of hackers could probably code-up during detention hall. Get this sucker viral and build the better FB already. The only way THEY can cut you down would be to cut themselves down.

Now THAT’s a God App.

*** 

(The implications of this app are vast – everything changes without changing anything. Follow-on articles will discuss these various nuances.  Any builders out there?)

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Why is college measured in “degrees”?

 

(Editor’s note; This is the first in a series of articles that challenges the “degree system” of knowledge measurement as archaic and irrelevant to what is actually happening in the world today.  Like the resume system  – it is ridiculous if not outright damaging to the prospect of knowledge behaving, and therefore, trading like a financial instrument.  

Why do we still care about college ‘degrees”?

The information that fuels the next economic paradigm will not be captured in the form of college degrees; rather, it will be captured in extremely detailed granularity of unique collections of knowledge assets in diverse combinations of persons that solve complex puzzles – and then share the solution with others.

This begs the question, why do we still care about University Degrees?

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Intellectual Property in Bloggerville

Most bloggers invite you to share their content far and wide on any one of many aggregation sites.  But some people get really upset if you post that article on your own aggregation blog (even with full credit and back links).

I am always amazed when I get that proverbial chest thumping quasi-barrister “cease and desist” letter, followed by remedial citation of copyright law, and always ending with some pathetic accusation of irreparable damages and criminal violation.   They get upset if you change the content and they get upset if you don’t.  The worst is when it comes from a self-proclaimed social media guru who touts all ‘dat social media Kool Aid in their consultancy propaganda.

Reality Check:

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Creative Capital; The Hidden Hero

 

Social capital, intellectual capital and creative capital are the factors of production for the Innovation Economy; next economic paradigm.  Few people realize that Silicon Valley arose from a perfect storm of social capital from the 1960’s, the music and arts scene of the same era, and the proximity of academic centers Stanford and Berkeley.  The Bay area corporations may have been the beneficiaries, not necessarily the originators of innovation.

Creative Capital remains the least understood, yet most important element of the Next Economic Paradigm.  As we continue our march into the regime of social media it is imperative that we understand, support, and develop this critical factor.  We cannot “take it for granted” that creativity exists and will always exist.  It must be recognized, developed, and integrated into the fold of Social Media.

Here are some stats:

Wikipedia:

  • Social Capital has it’s own page with 6816 word article
  • Human Capital (Intellectual Capital) has it’s own page at 2597 words
  • Creative Capital does not have a page of it’s own on Wikipedia

Twitter:

  • I found 20 Tweets referencing “Social Capital” in the last HOUR
  • I found 20 Tweets references to “Intellectual Capital” in the last 6 HOURS
  • There were 20 Tweets that referenced the term “Creative Capital” in the last WEEK (mostly as a trade name)

Facebook Groups:

  • Social Capital Groups: 2000
  • Human Capital/Intellectual Capital Groups 1000
  • Creative Capital: 412

Linkedin Groups:

  • Social Capital: 69
  • Human Capital (intellectual Capital): 272
  • Creative Capital: 12

While the ratios vary, the trend is fairly clear.  Creativity is not often interpreted as a financial instrument otherwise it would be associated with the term “Capital”.  There are other factors as well that may play into this.  Artists are often self-actualized outside of the trappings of material possessions and therefore less visible as economic or political power brokers.   As a professional class, they may be under-represented in social media space.  In addition, creativity does not punch a clock and is likely not working for wages as such. Or they may be running around dressed up like Engineers

I’ve made the point that was intended so now I’ll leave the remaining analysis to a person who has done a great deal to advance the modern understanding of the field of study related to creative capital; Richard Florida – an unsung hero for whom Wikipedia does have a page:

Richard Florida (born 1957 in Newark, New Jersey) is an American urban studies theorist.

Professor Florida’s focus is on social and economic theory. He is currently a professor and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management, at the University of Toronto. [1] He also heads a private consulting firm, the Creative Class Group.

He is best known for his work in developing his concept of the creative class, and its ramifications in urban regeneration. This research was expressed in Florida’s bestselling books The Rise of the Creative Class, Cities and the Creative Class, and The Flight of the Creative Class. A new book, focusing on the issues surrounding urban renewal and talent migration, titled Who’s Your City?, was recently published.

UA:F [1.6.1_878]
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Social Media; the Integrator of the Innovation Economy

Where are the gray suited diplomats holding each others forearms against a world map backdrop vowing to correct the world’s innovation system?  Where are the politicians joining across party lines about how to inject 700 billion dollars to fix the nation’s innovation system?  When will the Federal Reserve Chairman find the flaw in our national innovation system?  Hey, when will someone notice that we don’t have a national innovation system?

Schumpeterian Economics argues that corporations represent our nation’s innovation endowment. However, the primary function of a corporation is to make money, not explicitly to innovate.  Sure, they innovate if they must – most likely to beat down a more innovative competitor.  But, as soon as bad times hit, most will shift money from R&D to marketing.

If we look back only 400 hundred years, everyone on Earth lived on an average of about 500 dollars per year.  Then the innovations from the prior 2,000,000 years started to converge.  Counting backwards; the knowledge economy was “derived” from the information revolution, which was derived from the manufacturing revolution which was “derived” the Industrial revolution which was “derived” from the scientific revolution, which was “derived” from the agrarian economy.  Each revolution “Integrated” the tools of the prior revolution; The Knowledge economy integrated the tools of the information age and the information age integrated the tools of the manufacturing economy, etc.  By the way, the term “derived” is related to the term “derivative” – the primary hedging tool integrated in our current financial system.

Each economic revolution was marked by a tremendous increase in human productivity – we no longer need to milk our own cow. Victoria trades a dollar’s worth of her time as an airplane engineer for a dollar’s worth of the Robert’s time as an agricultural engineer.  Bill Gates is worth 50 billion dollars because he increased the productivity of a minimum of a billion people by a minimum of 50 dollars each.  I save 5 dollars in gas by not driving to the library when I can just search Google or Wikipedia.

The only way to “make” more money is to increase human productivity and the only sustainable way to increase human productivity is to find better ways of doing things.  Anything else is simply a transfer or redistribution of money.  Both are important – but often we confuse them under the same terminology: “making money”.  Or, we reverse the two by literally making (printing) money and then transferring it to corporations under the assumption that they will innovate enough to support everyone else plus the debt.  This system worked great for many years and in many political forms – it brought us from living in caves to a 65 trillion dollar global economy.  But like the economic revolutions before it, the current economic structure will soon give way to a new paradigm as we are forced to reach for higher productivity.

What the brilliant economist, Joseph Schumpeter did not have in his time was the technological breakthrough of Computer Enabled Society.  Taking a hint from the past; the new economic paradigm will be derived from the knowledge economy by integrating the tools developed during the knowledge economy. That is why we now have Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube – and all the rest.

Everyone agrees that information, knowledge, and innovation are profoundly related.  In fact, we can say that knowledge is derived from information and that innovation is derived from knowledge.  The new paradigm will be called the Innovation Economy and it will arise from the integration of the tools of the knowledge economy using social media. We see terms like open-sourcing, crowd sourcing, social networking, groundswells, innovation exchanges and a host of new Social Media Internet applications.  All of these have one thing in common; the tangibility of human knowledge.  This is the Holy Grail of modern finance and it is not a coincidence – it is now within our grasp.

In the past, human knowledge was only tangible inside the construct of a corporation – the corporate structure integrated knowledge assets to make things people want and need. However, with Social Media, knowledge assets will become tangible outside the corporate structure and integrated by knowledge communities, social networks, crowds, groundswells, etc. Knowledge communities will mix, combine, interact, and share knowledge; inevitably the end result is innovation – to make things that people want and need. These knowledge communities will become the next “corporation” acting directly as the integrator of human knowledge.  Ironically, Social Media “outsources” management.  Traditional corporations will not disappear as the agrarian economy never disappeared – they will just integrate.

Ideally, Wall Street is a simply a horse race where money is bet on corporations to fund innovation.  There is nothing wrong with that.  We don’t need a new financial system; we need a new and improved innovation system.  We have the technology; all we need now is the “integrator”.  The Ingenesist Project is the only viable comprehensive integrator now being proposed.  Perhaps it is not perfect, but the next economic paradigm will be certainly be derived from its improvement.

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