The Next Economic Paradigm

Tag: cost

A Value Game For The Aerobics Instructor

In yesterday’s post, we outlined The Value Game for University Outreach where the graduate was the shared asset and the school administration, the alumni association, the entrepreneurial community, and the wider community were the players. Now let’s presume that the shared asset is a small business owner specializing in aerobics instruction.

Using the same players:


A Value Game For The Aerobics Instructor

Suppose that a popular aerobics instructor has 20 students and charges 40 dollars for an 8 class sessions. The local health food store will place 10% coupon on store purchases against the 40 dollar tuition for the duration of the class. If the student bought 400 dollars worth of food from the health food store in 8 weeks, their tuition for the aerobics course would be free.  If they spend more, then the aerobics instructor is paid more.

The health food store already spends 10% of sales on advertising.  As such, the coupon is a superior incentive because it provides 100% ROI on the store’s ad spend.

Social Value Outcomes:

  • The health food store gains loyal repeat customers without advertising or spamming
  • The aerobics instructor earns an entrepreneurial wage making similar coupon arrangements with other health services, sporting goods stores, hotels chains, airlines, adventure tourism companies – anyone whose best interest it is to support her clients’ aspiration. They too benefit from loyal customers (anti-Groupon)
  • The Alumni Association would represent a network of clients, business owners, and database of persons likely to provide contacts, references, coupons, and advice to the aerobics instructor
  • The University can provide gym space, sponsorship, health education classes, and collect data such as; which coupons produce the highest yield for a given alumni product or service and player profile.

The Value Game Filters:

This particular value game automatically filters out the players that are not appropriate for the client.  In effect, the donut shop, tobacco store, or video game outlet would not likely benefit from playing this particular value game as their offering would reflect poorly on social values of the instructor and their coupons would not perform well enough vs. traditional advertising.  Instead, these products would find their own value game, if any.

Social Value Index (SVI)

The Social Value Index is a public statistic that compares the economic value (cost/benefit) of the socially integrated value game with the cost/benefit of the disaggregated advertising/spamming model which robs people of their time, passions, and quality of life.

Data as a shared asset

The SVI provides data that rewards this entrepreneur for doing what she is most passionate about; being knowledgeable and supportive of available health resources. The SVI rewards the store for enabling entrepreneurs in exchange for loyal repeat customers.  The Social Value Index rewards the network of alumni who align with their members (aerobics instructor) to deploy social currency to a community instead of spamvertising. The SVI rewards the University Outreach effort for organizing critical data, information, knowledge, innovation, and wisdom in the community.

At the end of the day: 

The Value Game is important because it allows entrepreneurial business plans that would not normally be viable under a purely monetary model, become highly viable when intangible Social Value (New Value) is added to the bottom line.

 

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Collateralized Innovation Obligations

Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) are a type of structured asset-backed security (ABS) whose value and payments are derived from a portfolio of fixed-income underlying assets. In the case of the current financial crisis, the underlying assets were home mortgages.  It is not necessary for the CDO buyer or seller to know who lives in the home and what they produce; the asset is a contract backed by future productivity.

CDOs vary in structure and underlying assets, but the basic principle is the same. To create a CDO, a corporate entity is constructed to hold contracts as collateral and to sell packages of predictable future cash flows to investors.  The more money handed out in home loans, the more money could be collected in CDOs

You are a liability.

While corporate leaders proclaim that people are the greatest asset, corporate accounting practices specify otherwise.  Employees are an expense and their salaries, benefits, and pensions are liabilities to be reduced any time the opportunity arises.  So what’s the problem?  Liabilities can’t innovate.

Suppose for a moment that people were in fact an asset on the accounting sheet and their salaries, benefits, and pensions were “investments”.

Collateralized Innovation Obligation (CIO):

The CIO would obviously be a type of structured asset-backed security (ABS) whose value and payments are derived from a portfolio of fixed-income underlying assets, specifically, the output of productive and motivated people.

Like the CDO, a CIO would vary in structure and underlying assets, but the basic principle is the same. To create a CIO, a corporate entity is constructed to hold assets as collateral and to sell predicted future cash flows to investors.  It is not necessary for the CIO buyer or seller to know who is innovating or what they are producing; the asset is a contract backed by future changes in productivity. The more money handed out in innovation loans, the more money could be collected in CIOs.  For all practical purposes, we could call it an Innovation Bond.

Enter Social Media:

Social media is teaching us an important lesson about innovation.  Every time you get a diverse group of people together to share ideas, new ideas form.  Every idea is useful as long as it is shared; thousands of bad ideas must expire before the good one appears.  Conversational currency is the vetting mechanism of all ideas.  While not every good idea becomes a great invention, every great invention is built from good ideas.  Machines cannot produce ideas and no single company, country or person holds a monopoly on ideas.  Innovation and the creation of all wealth arise from the social, creative, and intellectual interaction of people.

Conversational Currency: The underlying asset

The underlying asset that supports both the Collateralized Debt Obligation and the Collateralized Innovation Obligation is a person and their ideas; one is an asset and the other is a liability.  Both types of people go to work every day to interact with other people.  They both share ideas and create better ways of doing things.  People increase human productivity through fault tolerant networks and support systems. They transform information into knowledge and innovation – and both pay their mortgage.

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