The Ingenesist Project » creative

The 5 Pillars of The Inevitable Economy

Dan Robles — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 01:03:35 +0000

The previous article identified a recurring trend in human history; each new stage of civilization resulted from the integration of tools invented in the prior stage. That is; the output of one tool becomes the input of another.

In general, this is what defines a “system”. One of the problems with systems is that if one major piece fails, the whole system falters. Today we have computer systems, transportation systems, social systems and financial system that all behave in this way.

The financial system is built on five integrated pillars

Currency

A currency is a device that people use for both the storage and the exchange of value. Currency serves as a proxy that represents the value of things that people produce it is not in itself a product.

Inventory

The accounting system keeps track of the things that people produce. It is helpful to use a currency to represent the the storage and exchange of value from the things that people produce; but again, currency is only a representation of inventory.

Vetting

An economy must have a vetting mechanism that keeps the game fair otherwise nobody would play. Today this includes a legal system, contracts, and institutions - such as representative government – that defend the value of things that people produce.

Entrepreneurs

Classically, entrepreneurs are the merchant class who allocate land, labor, and money in various proportions and combinations as a means of organizing and matching the supply of things that people produce with the demand for what people produce.

Society

People define markets. They supply the inventory that other people demand and they demand the inventory that other people supply.

Examples of financial system failures are legendary

The Enron Fiasco was an accounting system failure caused by a vetting mechanism failure. The housing bubble was a was a currency failure because CDOs effectively divorced the dollar from any meaningful representation of productivity. The unemployment crisis is a social failure that limits the ability for people to supply the things that they demand.

The Inevitable Economy

So what if the functions of these same five pillars could be achieved and integrated in some other way? What if this is already happening? Going through the list backwards to reflect a mirror image:

Society

People are reorganizing in new and different ways. They increasingly use social media and mobile technology to supply and demand limitless information with which they then use to supply and demand many useful things of each other.

Entrepreneurs

Land, labor, and capital are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the age of non-scarce information – instead, entrepreneurs are allocation social, creative, and intellectual assets as a means of matching the supply and demand for the things that people need.

Vetting

Social contracts are playing an increasing role in keeping the game fair. It is not in the best interest for anyone to act with low integrity when they can be Googled in a matter of seconds.

Inventory

The knowledge asset inventory is forming in many applications and platforms – but it is not yet integrated. When this happens, an accounting system for social, creative, and intellectual assets will immediately emerge.

Finally, the currency

Any device that can represent human productivity better than today’s money will become that next currency. This can only happen after the four pillars begin to integrate.

The currency is supported by the system. The system is NOT supported by the currency.

Ideas Are The New Currency

Dan Robles — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:30:53 +0000

‘Tis the season for “The Year In Pictures” – the annual new year pictorial accounting of the events of the outgoing year. Any rational collection for 2011 would include three events; Arab Spring, The Earthquake / Tsunami in Japan, and Occupy Wall Street. These three events eclipsed the Royal Wedding, Steve Jobs, the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the space shuttle retirement and even the end of the war in Iraq.

These three events tell a very interesting story of who we are and where we are going as a civilization.

Classical economists such as David Ricardo and Adam Smith brought us the idea that a merchant class allocates land, labor, and capital in various combinations as “the factors of production” that match supply and demand for all that societies need via the invisible hand of market capitalism.

Yet, in a single hour, land, labor, and billions of units of Capital were wiped off the surface of the Earth by in Japan. While we see the images of total destruction, there are hundreds of square miles that were untouched and where all seems quite normal – except for that invisible hand of radioactive cesium. Land, labor, and capital failed as a an economic cornerstone for all those who had once called this land home.

In the Middle East, with few jobs and even fewer opportunities for youth, the quaint notion of “land and labor allocations” crumbled under the forces of people with mobile access to dynamic data, free information, community knowledge, innovation, and wisdom. Governments, with no relative shortage of money, were unable to challenge the opposing factors. Again, the idea of land, labor, and capital as the economic cornerstone had failed.

Quite appropriately, Occupy Wall Street was executed on borrowed land, with borrowed labor, and borrowed capital. The operation was peaceful so nobody died. The stock market did not even crash. Politicians went largely unscathed and the attorneys stayed in their collective offices. Nothing physical was actually created, and therefore, nothing physical was actually destroyed. However, a great deal was produced.

All three of these events had something in common – they all produced something very tangible. They all produced an idea in the minds of others.

As we review the year we review it is increasingly evident that land, labor, and capital are inadequate to articulate what people actually produce. It will be through these shortcomings of classical economics that a new economy will form. The degree to which society actually produces the things that society actually needs, this new economy should not look much different. The degree to which society does not actually need the things that capitalism produces, great new ideas will emerge.

What was once the land of opportunity can now become a planet of opportunity.

Photo Credit: David Shankbone via Mashable

Do We Really Need To Fail?

Dan Robles — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:49:00 +0000

Yesterday, I heard a report on NPR about the resource management department in North West Washington, in response to diminished funding – is certifying private boats for emergency duty in clean up, security, and rescue. This is logical because nobody knows and understands the waters of Northern Puget Sound and The Strait of Juan De Fuca than the local tribes and others who ply those waters daily.

Today, I heard another report on NPR about how the City of Houston has gained far more from the demise of Enron than their existence. Enron would recruit the top intellect in the country, move them to Houston and reward them for creativity and hard work. The collapse of Enron released 4000 hugely talented people to the Houston Economy where many have started new businesses with remarkable success.

Vicious Circle or Virtuous circle:

I will not pass judgment beyond what these reports stated, except that there is something very valid about the “Knowledge Inventory” that exists in a community and their specific location. The Jane Jacobs externality proposes that endowment of creative and educated people drives economic growth in a community by attracting investment and development, which attracts more smart people, etc.

Vicious Galaxies or Virtuous Galaxies

As the NPR reports suggest, the type of investment and development is dependent on the quality and quantity of knowledge assets that exist in a particular location. Now, let’s extrapolate that to include all disciplines and talents of knowledge that exist in all communities and we encounter a stark reality that there is no knowledge inventory from which to build – except in the response to a failure such as the corrosion of government spending or in the wake of corruption and associated corporate collapse.

Yes, it is often said that adversity brings out the best in people, but is that really necessary? Do we really need for the whole rig to collapse before we emerge from the ashes?

We need to build the knowledge inventory today. People need to know what people know – that is where the truth lives. We need to know what can be built from the parts that we have in the bin. We don’t want to try to build something from the wrong parts any more than we want to misallocate the right parts to build the wrong things. In any industry in the world, none of these situations would pass the stink test, yet this is the state of our communities today. We don’t even know that we don’t know what we know. Seriously, is anyone else wondering about these things?

Plenty of Work But Where Is The Knowledge?

Dan Robles — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:37:35 +0000

Millions of people are looking for Jobs. Meanwhile, employers complain of a chronic “skills mismatch” that prevents them from hiring people or initiating new innovations.

When an engineer is laid off from an airplane manufacturer, a company like Starbucks has no idea what that person knows even though aircraft and milk steamers have a great deal in common from the perspective of the Engineer (both are pressure vessels subject to extreme environmental conditions).

The same is true for a marine engineer, and HVAC engineer, or an electrostatic coating machinery engineer. Each of these disciplines has far more in common than they have differences. However, if you compare the descriptions for any of these jobs, they sound like they all happen on different planets.

God forbid you are not an expert on MS Excel, which only takes a few hours for almost anyone to learn – yet not tagging that radio button can negate 20 years of experience that only 1% of people have the desire, discipline, and intellect to achieve.

The same holds true for many talents and professions. There are serious problems with the way that we discern the supply and demand for knowledge assets.

What is needed is an intermediate knowledge inventory in the commons that everyone can index to. So when an engineer tags “pressure vessels” the term registers into the resident ontology of all observers.

Why is this better?

Of course companies are trying to eliminate variance and risk by hiring a person who has been trained by someone else – preferable a direct competitor. On the other hand, the mantra of modern business is to innovate. Innovation does not happen by duplicating yesterday’s ideas. Mixing diverse combinations of knowledge assets, and not all common knowledge assets, accelerates the process of Innovation. Think of all the music that is yet to be created for lack of musicians to play the different instruments.

An intermediate knowledge inventory solves both problems by allowing companies to introduce diverse knowledge assets without introducing irrelevant knowledge assets. It also gives people far more mobility to pursue specialties that they are most talented and interested in. As such, the allocation of knowledge assets would improve to match supply of knowledge with the demand for knowledge in an innovation economy.

There is not a shortage or work, only a shortage of knowledge about knowledge.

Supply and Demand for Knowledge Assets

Dan Robles — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 22:34:14 +0000

If we follow the Wall Street accounting model, the supply and demand for knowledge assets are cast against the factors of production; land, labor, and capital. The typical corporate human resource department looks to the community for labor units within commuting distance to a factory, and who are willing to rent their time in exchange a minimum amount of money.

But Land is Obsolete

Technology has made the idea of “land” as a factor of production almost obsolete. Knowledge assets travel over the Internet and can be deployed and organized in many ways across long distances without a factory. Indeed there are server farms and automation houses where things are made if needed – but these are hardly factors of production as they once were.

What exactly is a Labor unit again?

Machines have replaced much of what we once called “labor”. I am sitting at Starbucks where a smiling robot is the only thing missing from the age of automated lattes. The social, creative, and intellectual capital required to create, design, maintain, and serve the technology is what ushers us into the knowledge economy and the associated innovation economy.

Capital is arbitrary

Everyone knows that money is created out of thin air when someone allocates their future productivity to the bankers balance sheet in exchange for a place to sleep. When this game loses its entertainment value, “capital” as a factor of production will also become obsolete.

The Supply and Demand for Knowledge Assets:

Knowledge assets are deployed by teachers and replicated by student. Teachers represent the supply of knowledge and students represent the demand for knowledge. In between these two extremes are collaborations – that is, varying combinations of teaching and learning that ultimately results in a productive outcome such as a latte, automobile, or computer program.

If we sample a population of knowledge assets across some geographic area (Land) we would expect to find something that looks like a bell curve.

If the bell curve has a different shape, this tells us what things can be made and what things cannot (Labor).

So when people allocate their own productivity, they are in effect assigning their productivity to a community balance sheet (Capital). They are saying “this is what we are willing to make because we have the freedom, liberty, and we intion to pursue our happiness”.

Hardly a Wall Street model.

The result is that the social, creative, and intellectual assets of people must now replace Land, Labor, and Capital as factors of production in the new value economy. Trying to produce anything less would be inefficient in a Capitalist system – perhaps some may have noticed as much lately.

What Is An Ingenesist?

Dan Robles — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 23:53:32 +0000

Eric Rosenblith 1920-2010

I have been putting off writing this blog post until I could find a simple answer to the question “What is an Ingenesist?”. I invented the term “Ingenesist” to capture the creative, intellectual and social nature of human ingenuity without falling back on current definitions and the silos that perpetuate them. Something has gone wrong with the world and the solution could not be found in the current world view – I needed a new word for my work.

Ingenesist comes from the Latin (ingeniare), French (ingénieur), and Spanish (ingeniero) word for Engineer. These words, of course, were created long before an engineer was defined by such alphabet soup as BSME. MSCE, IEEE, ABET, NCEES, EIT, PE, etc… The term ‘Ingenesist’ was meant to represent people whose ideas and actions increase the productivity of other people.

A friend of mine lost his dad yesterday. I read the obituary and could not help but realize that this person lived through what were likely the darkest and the brightest hours of modern human civilization. He was an artist and a teacher.

Then I hit the quote in Mr. Rosenblith’s obituary:

“We truly need to be thinkers, poets, painters, engineers, and philosophers.’’ – Eric Rosenblith

And that is how I found my simple answer. With humility and simplicity, he captured the creative, intellectual and social nature of human ingenuity. The least I could do was finally write this blog post.

My sincere condolences to Alan and his family. Please support the Symbionomics Project on Kickstarter

Symbionomics And The Space Between Things

Dan Robles — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 23:09:10 +0000

Each stage of economic development in human history was derived from the prior stage by integrating the tools developed in that prior stage; The agrarian era, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the information era, the knowledge economy all followed this pattern.

Whatever happens next will be extremely interesting.

Today we are rapidly emerging era of human history where there is great cause for optimism. The tools developed from the Knowledge economy are truly remarkable. For the first time in modern history, Value is not represented by things, it is represented by the space between things.

Symbionomics

The Symbionomics project is produced by world class film maker Alan Rosenblith and visionary Sustainable Community Developer, Jay Standish. Their objective is to reveal the next great truism in the context of human economic systems. Please watch the following trailer and please support this essential project. The hardest secret to keep is the truth.

LandingPage from alan rosenblith on Vimeo.

Social Value Creation: How To Manufacture Wisdom

Dan Robles — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 09:00:54 +0000

We call this wisdom

In the old days, the hiring manager was the person to know if you wanted to get a job. They would read your resume and compare it with the “bell curve” in their mind. This bell curve contains a statistical sample of all similar situations that the manager has witnessed, the variables involved, and a range of outcomes observed across their long and illustrious career…Ohhhmmmmmm

We Call This Simulated Wisdom

Modern HR systems try to simulate this wisdom through a series of innovations such as key word search, structured interviews, personality tests, and employee incentives. Now we can use Google (an information company) to derive sort of a proxy for wisdom as we assess search results in our own image. Facebook and Linkedin go a step further by providing us with another filter through which to pass judgement upon a future employee or partner. The problem is that the more we look into these systems, the more they deliver back to us a reflection of ourselves…Ohhhmmmmm

: Social Media vs. Normalized Intellectual, Social, and Creative Capital

The Data need to be Normalized

The world has become so strange, complex, technological, and interwoven, that no single person can possibly posses such a vast and broad set of experiences as to arrive at an optimized outcome every time. Innovation favors strategic combination of diverse knowledge unlike the Industrial revolution which favored identical packets of similar knowledge. The Innovation Economy will require a completely new approach to social value creation.

The Social Credit Score

Not unlike the FICO score, the knowledge inventory is a collection of potential knowledge events where the social network is a reporting agency that has a vested interest in meaningful knowledge events. Unlike FICO however, the variables for knowledge can be infinite (think of the Dewey Decimal System). Also, a Social Credit Score would respond to positive events rather than a finite set of negative “hits”.

The Percentile Search Engine

Instead of just returning information, this new search engine must return probabilities from which an entrepreneur may test scenarios related to the likelihood of executing a particular business process at a known time, cost, proximity, ROI, etc.

Example

Innovation Economics

An entrepreneur may want to know if her team has enough knowledge to execute a business plan. Perhaps the team has too much knowledge and they should try something more valuable. Maybe the team does not have enough knowledge and they should attempt another opportunity or accumulate training.

Valuation of Knowledge The search engine can look into a network and identify the supply and demand of a knowledge asset. If it is unavailable or too expensive, the search engine can adjust for price, risk, or options that may emerge at a later date.

Business Intelligence Organizations can scan each other’s knowledge inventory and decide to compete, cooperate, acquire, or evade.

Knowledge management If a key person retires, the entrepreneur would simulate the knowledge that is lost and reassign people strategically.

The Secret Sauce Companies such as Disney and Boeing both use Engineers, each would have proprietary algorithm of knowledge that represents their “secret sauce” of success. These recipes can be adjusted and improved to reflect and preserve the wisdom of an organization. Over time, these algorithms will become far more valuable then the Patents and Trade Secrets created by them – this will allow technologies to be open sourced much more profitably and shared across more industries.

Eventually, we will learn to manufacture wisdom …OhhhhMmmmmGeeeee

Death By Résumé

Dan Robles — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 09:00:09 +0000

Résumé: A French word for separating the body from the brain

We are entering a renewal in the work force. The global imperative is for the United States to become an innovation economy now. This is an entirely different animal than the Industrial revolution; I have long argued that the résumé system is by far the most archaic knowledge management “currency” of trade in use today.

The entire premise of the résumé is destitute, if not destructive, in the modern world. Words on a computer screen are a very low level ‘media form’ being used to describe a very high ‘media form’; social, creative, and intellectual capital. It’s like using crayons to design an aircraft.

If the key words are so important, why have any other words?

A manager always hires people that remind them of themselves. They estimate the future success of a candidate based on their own limited, and often static, past experiences. The world is moving so fast and has become so complex that no manager can possibly know enough to capitalize the future based on a viable statistical sample of past experiences – we’re all holding on for dear life in a hurricane of change. The problems and opportunities of the future are so huge, so important, and happening so amazingly fast yet the allocation of human resources is worse than random for a candidate pool.

Here are a few comments that I’ve picked off some recent Human Resources Community Blogs:

***

1. And our future goes with it:

“Most recruiting systems I’ve seen screen out innovators. Any résumé that is unique, different or convention-defying gets surreptitiously put in the junk pile.”

2. Start by looking in the junk pile:

“The Innovation Economy requires that the talent that creates the most value for an organization must rise to the top. Innovators are playing an increasing role in creating shareholder value – one might argue that they create the most shareholder value these days – and figuring out how to find and attract this very different breed of talent is one of the most critical initiatives you can launch within your organization.”

3. What part of “share holder value” are we having difficulty with?

“The most innovative people I have ever met don’t follow conventions in their experience or in their résumé. Or, they get bored very quickly when they can’t innovate or are forced to focus on operations, and efficiency. Most might look like (and even be) job hoppers”

4. Here is my favorite comment – I wish I could hug this person:

“I think it takes more than a résumé to screen an Innovator in or out. As blogs, blog posts, social networking, more powerful search tools, personal websites, the emergence of video on the web, talent platforms that offer CRM, etc. etc. etc. continue to become additional tools for an employer to consider in making a hiring decision, is the résumé still a currency for a candidate?”

***

We have an inventory and CAD model of every nut, rivet, and panel that goes on an airplane – why would we try to build anything without one?

Social Capitalism And The ROI For Social Media

Dan Robles — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 09:00:10 +0000

Social Capitalism can be summed up as Classical Capitalism except with the factors of production swapped from “Land, Labor, Financial Capital” to “Social Capital, Creative Capital, and Intellectual Capital”.

This video introduces a new way of looking at social media valuation. It should be obvious by now that people create value in social media – otherwise they would not do it. The monetization paradox is stuck on “how can this value expressed as a financial instrument”?

If you engage your clients in the same currency that they are trading among themselves, the greater the likelihood you will realize the value of the new media phenomenon.

What’s Your Cut of the $5 Trillion Knowledge Economy?

Dan Robles — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:00:08 +0000

People accumulate a wealth of knowledge in their lives as they pass from project to project and industry to industry. Each of our social, creative, and intellectual pursuits and exposures combines to form the person who we are and the contribution to society that we represent.

Your knowledge and experience also helps others predict what preferences you may have and what decisions you may make. Corporations, advertisers, banks, insurance companies, and politicians all want to know this and they will go to extreme and expensive measures to get it – why not just sell it to them?

Peace sells, but who’s buying?

Management of companies, little league teams, Rotary Clubs, even raising a family, is extremely valuable knowledge to a wide variety of situations. Civic service, spirituality, military service, and philanthropy provide a basis for a host of knowledge attributes. Academic accomplishment, physical achievement, artistic expression, manual dexterity, and whole body coordination provides great insight to the application of all knowledge. Physical challenges, grief, personal struggles, and the experience of injustice further add to the wealth of knowledge one accumulates in a lifetime.

Every person is unique with a different set of knowledge than any other; therefore, everyone has something to offer to someone else. Each person’s combination of formal and informal education is valuable in it’s uniqueness. With the proper system and incentives in place, trillions of dollars are on the table to bid for access to your knowledge.

The Den of Thieves:

The resumes that we post on Monster.com are woefully inadequate and so heavily gamed that predictive utility related to your future decisions and innovative capacity is severely compromised.

The credit score also measures past behavior by tracking negative events; many of which are outside the control of the subject such as a layoff, fraud, medical emergencies, etc. Again, the credit score is quite useless as a predictor of future decisions and innovative capacity.

Now we have Social Media and the mad scramble to be visible in social media space. The scourge of marketers, spammers, and fraudsters are close behind chasing your information that they are all too happy to sell to the aforementioned “clients”.

Take a Step Back … and get a grip

We are talking about your information that describes your knowledge attributes which predicts your preferences, your future decisions, and your innovation. Yet complete industries exist to collect it from you for free, organize it, and sell it to others for a great deal of money. There are 5000 job boards collecting resumes, 300 Million credit scores being securitized by Wall Street, and 12,000 social media sites aggregating your creative content, relationships, and knowledge attributes.

Join The Ingenesist Project:

The Ingenesist Project specifies a system where your knowledge attributes are expressed in a packet of code that you control, distribute, regulate, withhold and track as you wish.

The result is that you will be paid to learn, to know, to practice, and to participate in life as you wish. It becomes in your best economic interest to produce exactly what you are best at, and have a talent for producing. It will be in the best interest of corporations, marketers, Wall Street, insurance companies, and Politicians to support you in these pursuits so they can “farm” the knowledge today that will buy their products tomorrow.

Independence Is A State of Mind

Dan Robles — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 08:01:46 +0000

Independence is a state of mind. Americans have always chosen independence – and they will continue to do so. It is often convenient to let ourselves trust elected leaders and the esteemed business titans to do what is in our best interest. Don’t be fooled, this is “trust”, not dependence.

It is likewise unwise to underestimate the independence movement – independence from corrupt currency, independence from fossil fuel, independence from corporate greed, independence from divisive politics, independence from endless war. Just when everyone thinks that Americans are up against the ropes, they come up with an idea so radical, so creative, and so astonishingly consciousness-altering, the rest of the world just shakes their heads in collective disbelief.

That is where we are today. Something extraordinary is about to happen in the way Americans organize themselves. Nothing is sacred, no one is immune. The next economic paradigm will alter the course of civilization.

All stages of human development were derived from the prior stage of human development by integrating the tools of that prior stage. For example, the agrarians integrated the tools of the hunter-gather such as using the chopping rock to till a field for planting – and so forth. Likewise, the industrial revolution integrated the tools of the scientific revolution; mathematics, chemistry, and engineering. Earlier this century, the computer age integrated the tools of the industrial revolution, etc.

The next economic paradigm will be derived from the Knowledge economy by integrating the tools of the knowledge economy; these are The Internet, Social Media, mobile communications technology, etc…

Americans will chose Independence every time.

Engineers Are Money

Dan Robles — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 09:00:09 +0000

Engineers are money.

China and India are producing millions of engineers as part of their global economic dominance strategy. Engineers increase productivity and productivity creates wealth. Why? Because money is only a means for storage and exchange of value and engineers create the value.

America has no idea who the engineers are

I heard an interesting comment on a group discussion board recently; “there are so many engineers on the streets that employers have their pick of the crop”.

First, I find the reference to “crops” ironic. Second, why should engineers need to fit every nuance of a job description? Engineers tell us the things that we don’t already know – who exactly writes those job descriptions if they know what they don’t know? Or in practical terms, why isn’t an Aerospace Engineer immediately qualified to be an Energy Engineer?

The Ingenesist Project identifies 3 types of knowledge assets: Social Capital refers to one’s ability to organize, perform, and manage themselves in teams of other people. Creative Capital refers to the ability to relate seemingly unrelated concepts, objects, and perceptions into new and innovative ideas. Intellectual capital refers to the ability to deploy book learning, objective reasoning, and tactical experience toward specific objectives.

Everyone has ALL of the above asset categories, however, we each posses them in different proportions. People like Steve Jobs have all of these in very high quantities, but the rest of us are somewhere in the middle. Most have a surplus in one or two at the expense of the remaining asset categories. Engineers typically enjoy a surplus of intellectual and creative capital at the expense of social capital.

Social Capital

Should we, as a society, expect engineers to meet meet the same social standards as say, Baristas? The job market favors the young, socially adept, and politically wired people. But engineers are a different – we all need them to be exactly the way they are in order for the rest of us to be who we are. If engineers were “marketers” they would either cease to be engineers or marketing would cease to be manipulative.

Who’s your money maker?

Engineers are responsible for nearly every penny of value stored and exchanged in a modern economy. Roads, infrastructure, medical devices, food production, software, hardware, housing, transportation – anything worth anything is in some way touched by God and an engineer. Engineers are responsible for creating the tangible value we enjoy so dearly but is also so easily corrupted by others.

Who is squandering whom?

So when I hear comments like; “there are so many engineers on the streets that employers have their pick of the crop”. I ask myself, “how exactly did that employer become an employer without engineers”? How does any employer expect to remain an employer without the direct, strategic, and honorable deployment of engineering assets? How does a country expect to arise from financial crisis and insurmountable debt obligation without elevating their engineers to “First-Responder” status?

I heard a story that Haiti is so poor, they would chop down a fruit tree for charcoal. Squandering engineers is like killing the golden goose. Every single engineer in America should be cherished. Every single engineer should have their pick of most qualified employers, not the other way around. Every single engineer should have a job waiting for them as soon as the prior one is finished. Engineers should be paid money, real money – not some “proxy” for money.

Video: Intellectual Property in the Social Media Cloud

Dan Robles — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:01:46 +0000

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

Or maybe the last thing that Wall Street wants is for Engineers, Architects, designers, and creative people to get “royalties” on their work. That is What Wall Street does, they collect the royalties of the creative people in America….until now. Social media is a social contract, IP is our currency.

Image credit

Video: Taxonomy for Community Knowledge Inventory

Dan Robles — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:01:55 +0000

Any taxonomy that is used to classify information is a candidate for the classification of knowledge. This is because knowledge is related to information in a differential equation that also includes data and innovation (another blog post).

The trick is that everyone needs to be using the same taxonomy so that we can all access knowledge inventories of the people around us as easily as it is to access books on Amazon.com. This will lead to a trade in knowledge assets formally the sole domain of corporations through the process of industrialization (yet another blog post) .

Please enjoy these videos, use them as you wish and let us know what you think.

Where is The Knowledge Inventory?

Dan Robles — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 08:12:01 +0000

There is no knowledge inventory of our communities. The is a STUNNING omission for a country whose only hope at climbing out of economic hardship is sequestered within the innovative minds of its people.

If done correctly, knowledge can behave as an asset of trade. This must first start with a comprehensive knowledge inventory. Like the human genome project, the knowledge inventory project must be a sustained effort.

Link to specification document

Pssst … Wanna Get Wasted?

Dan Robles — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:00:59 +0000

Many Social Media Gurus are espousing a new culture that their clients should forget about blogging (adding meaningful content) in favor of the ubiquitous widespread “updates”.

Using automated apps, you no longer need to waste time creating content that teaches or expresses, you can populate across social media space carefully wedged in between someone else’s creative content. I find this appalling.

The new marketing mantras go something like these:

“Go where your customers congregate”.
“Gain their trust by sharing your stuff”
“Soon, you can start to influence their behavior”
“Once hooked, they will do your deed for freeeee!!”

This is starting to sound more like the neighborhood drug dealer than any sustainable economic paradigm.

Slavery on Steroids

Slavery is a term characterized in part by the coercion of another person to perform or act without compensation. The effects of slavery are not only physical, but mental as well. The effects of oppression manifest themselves in addictive behaviors.

Social acceptance is an extremely powerful psychotic that can be cleverly turned against any person. The techniques of social media are getting increasingly sophisticated in hijacking and consuming the social capital of others.

Green Marketing

It does not take long to see that the marketing professions are defining the social media space regardless of what anyone says about user-generated content. The danger is that social media will become just as unsustainable as the economy that it replaces. People will soon lose the ability to produce the currency that the media demands to support itself.

Ban advertising

t would be high temple sacrilege for any social media monetization strategist to suggest that advertising of any kind must be banned. Well, not exactly, but the objective of advertising can be redefined if there were a means to do so.

The only sustainable monetization strategy (of which there are terribly few current examples) are the deployment of social media applications that empower people to discover their own individual talents, to pursue what they are naturally best at and enjoy doing most – while also eliminating the clutter and irrelevant messages that distracts them from their personal life goals.

This means that brands should communicate more and not less. They should identify, educate, and promote the talents and abilities of a million customers instead of 1 superstar athlete or celebrity.

The proverbial sports analogy:

Advertisers should sit in the bleachers and cheer on their favorite customer, but they should not be in the game, blowing the whistle, or running the scoreboard. Let them pay admission, see my logo, and buy my overpriced beer. Let them sell to each other on their own dime – but under no circumstances should they be allowed on the field, in the schools, or in the home without explicit and expressed permission of the customer.

The Monetization Mystery

Dan Robles — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:44:51 +0000

OK, the social media buzz is getting a little stale folks.

Yes we know that social media is valuable.
Yes we know that lots of folks are doing it.
Yes we know that the predictive web is predicted.
Yes we all know that all this activity will mysteriously “monetize”

Show me how everyone is related and I’ll show you a new economic paradigm. Here is how they are not related:

They are not related by “earning” people’s trust today so you can shove your product down their throat tomorrow.
They are not related to collecting thumbnails.
They are not related to giving the g00gle alg00rithm an 00rgasm.
They are not related by “The 6 Steps to [Fill in The Gap]”.

The next economic paradigm is related to transformation.

People transform data into information
People transform information into knowledge
People transform knowledge into innovation
People transform innovation into data

Under a set of fundamental assumptions that:

All people are socially talented
All people are intellectually talented
All people are creatively talented
All people are good at something
Nobody is good at everything

This is how value is generated. This is where the mystery of monetization hides.

Deep Web Search

Dan Robles — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:00:05 +0000

Deep Web Search Engine is here. This represents a new economic paradigm since increasing the available information increases the rate of change of knowledge across diverse communities. Keep your eyes on this one – it’s a big one.

Community Currency; Ithaca Hours

Dan Robles — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:00:38 +0000

Editor’s note: I found this copyrighted piece from all the way back in 1995. I find such history enlightening. As a researcher it allows me to eliminate certain variables such as Social Media, 9/11, TARP, GWB, BHO, Global Warming, and a host of other firebrand influences on public opinion and action. That said, the clarity is remarkable. Take strong note of the intention of fulfilling social priorities. Today, as our corporations and government (federal, state, and local) continue to cut social programs in order to service interest on debt, the void on social programs will induce an inevitable condition; Community Conversational Currency.

by Paul Glover

Originally published in IN CONTEXT #41, Summer 1995, Page 30
Copyright (c)1995, 1997 by Context Institute

Many communities are giving up waiting on large corporations or government to invest or provide jobs, and are instead building on their own strengths and resources.

The people of Ithaca have done so by issuing their own paper currency, called Ithaca HOURS. Residents list the goods or services they have to offer in a large catalog – and then use the HOURS they earn to purchase goods and services from others. For some, this barter system provides a crucial margin of financial support. For others, it’s a great way to meet people and build a sense of community. All find their spending habits redirected locally.

Here in Ithaca, New York, we’ve begun to gain control of the social and environmental effects of commerce by issuing over $50,000 of our own local paper money, to over 950 participants, since 1991. Thousands of purchases and many new friendships have been made with this cash, and about $500,000 of local trade has been added to the Grassroots National Product.

We printed our own money because we watched Federal dollars come to town, shake a few hands, then leave to buy rainforest lumber and to fight wars. Ithaca HOURS, by contrast, stay in our region to help us hire each other. While dollars make us increasingly dependent on multinational corporations and bankers, HOURS reinforce community trade and expand commerce that is more responsive to our concern for ecology and social justice.

Here’s how it works….

The Ithaca HOUR is Ithaca’s $10 bill, because $10 per hour is the average of wages/salaries in Tompkins County. These HOUR notes, in four denominations, buy plumbing, carpentry, electrical work, roofing, nursing, chiropractic care, child care, car and bike repair, food, eyeglasses, firewood, gifts, and thousands of other goods and services. Our credit union accepts them for mortgage and loan fees. People pay rent with HOURS. The best restaurants in town take them, as do movie theaters, bowling alleys, health clubs, two large locally-owned grocery stores, and 30 farmers’ market vendors. Anyone may use HOURS, and hundreds have done so.

Ithaca’s new HOURly minimum wage, enforced by general consent, lifts the lowest pay up without knocking down higher wages. For example, several of Ithaca’s organic farmers are paying the highest farm labor wages in the Western Hemisphere: $10 of spending power per hour. These farmers benefit by the HOUR’s loyalty to local agriculture. On the other hand, dentists, massage therapists and lawyers charging more than the $10 average per hour are permitted to collect several HOURS hourly, although we hear increasingly of professional services provided for our equitable wage.

Everyone who agrees to accept HOURS is paid two HOURS (worth $20) for being listed in our newsletter Ithaca Money. Every eight months they may apply to be paid an additional two HOURS, as reward for continuing participation. This is how we gradually and carefully increase the per capita supply of our money.

Ithaca’s printed currency honors local features we respect, like native flowers, powerful waterfalls, crafts, farms, and our children. The multi-colored HOURS – some printed on locally-made watermarked cattail (marsh reed) paper, all with serial numbers – are harder to counterfeit than US dollars.

We regard Ithaca HOURS as real money, backed by real people, real time, real skills and tools. Dollars, by contrast, are funny money, backed no longer by gold or silver but by less than nothing: $4.8 trillion of national debt.

Ithaca Money’s 1,200 listings, rivaling the Yellow Pages, are a portrait of our community’s capability, bringing into the marketplace time and skills not employed by the conventional market. Residents are proud of income earned by doing work they enjoy.

At the same time Ithaca’s locally-owned stores, which help keep wealth local, make sales and get spending power they otherwise would not have. And over $4,000 of local currency has been donated to 22 community organizations so far by our wide-open governing body.

As we discover new ways to provide for each other, we replace dependence on imports. Yet our greater self-reliance, rather than isolating Ithaca, gives us more potential to reach outward with ecological export industry. We can provide the capital for new businesses with loans of our own cash. HOUR loans are made without interest charges.

We encounter each other as fellow Ithacans, rather than as winners and losers scrambling for dollars. As we do so, we help relieve the social desperation which has led to compulsive shopping, wasted resources, and homelessness and hunger. We’re making a community while making a living.

Paul Glover, who created the HOUR system, is a community economist and ecological urban designer with a degree in city management. For contact information, see Toolbox below.

Community-Based Currency

People use Ithaca HOURS for everything from goat cheese to tax consulting. Here are just a few of their stories.

Thomas found work by calling those who had listed a need for computer help. And when he read that Ithaca Rape Crisis received an HOUR grant, he did computer programming for them. His HOURS were spent for food, credit union membership, and dressmaking for his wife: “Our goal is to have money with value not tied to the dollar and not subject to the whims of the global market.”

Judy has earned many HOURS selling Jim’s hand-painted T-shirts, and spends them right away: “Ithaca has so much expertise in so many areas. … We’re like puzzle pieces that need to be put into a picture.”

Elson, who retired in 1972, earns HOURS doing heating and air conditioning consulting: “This HOUR system takes me back 20 years and makes me feel constructive again. My wife and I spend HOURS at the Farmers’ Market, where we browse and chat with old friends. I was very pleased last winter to hire two girls with HOURS to shovel heavy snow. They used the HOURS for rent.”

Bill, works for The Alternatives Federal Credit Union: “Because Ithaca HOURS can be part of the purchase of a house, they can help people who do not have enough dollars buy a home.”

Marty has earned HOURS from mortgage payments, massage, and hand-painted silk scarves: “”The first thing I ever bought with HOURS was goat cheese. Richard at the Farmers’ Market had never accepted any, and I had never spent any. Since the note says an HOUR, he described an hour of his work. People gathered around as he explained how he made goat cheese.”

Nancy has done tax returns and investment planning for HOURS and trades: “There’s a lot of anger about how work by women is undervalued. An HOUR being an hour’s work is a nice way around that.”

Jim has swapped plumbing for drywalling: “With the Ithaca Money list we can depend on each other as a community, rather than on faceless corporations beyond our control. Trading creates a tremendous feeling of good will and self-esteem amongst all involved.”

Sara grows organic strawberries and knits angora hats. She’s just received a large loan of HOURS from a carpenter friend who has earned a lot of them. Needing money before berry sales begin, she’ll use HOURS for child care and to hire farm labor.

Steve sells notecards and T-shirts for HOURS, most spent for meals and employees: “Local currency makes local self-sufficiency more possible. It helps protect our local environment and resource base so that economic activity doesn’t damage the ecological base of the region.”

Craig & Stephanie sell water filters, biodegradable soaps, and unbleached cotton clothing. Their HOURS have gone to restaurant meals, advertising, and construction of display racks. Craig says: “When we have a community that is cash poor, like Ithaca, barter allows people to spend money and live a better quality of life.”

A Local Currency Primer; Comfort Dollars

Dan Robles — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:00:24 +0000

Douglas Rushkoff has an interesting post, indirectly on how local currency can spur social capital. As more corporate and governmental institutions fail to meet the needs of society, people will need a currency that they can trade among each other. If the dollar fails, the need will be dire.

The difficulties that will ultimately limit such enterprise is the inability to capitalize and securitize a social currency. Conversational Currency solves this problem by demonstrating how social media, if organized correctly, can simulate many of the functions of corporations and government. As such, people will ultimately trade the currency they trust most.

I like Douglas Rushkoff’s work. I suppose the ultimate test of concept would be if he finds this post and contacts us to integrate The Ingenesist Project and Conversational Currency into his thought leadership. Thanks Douglas!!

By Douglas Rushkoff

“A great, tiny organic cafe in my town, Comfort, decided to expand to a second, larger location last year. The owner, John Halko, has been renovating the new space for a year, and – thanks to the credit crisis – has been unable to raise the cash required to finish and finally open. With currency unavailable from traditional, centralized money-lending banks, Halko has turned instead to his community – to us – for support.

Granted, this is a small town. Pretty much everybody goes to Comfort – the only restaurant of its kind on the small strip – and we all have a stake in its success. Any extension of Comfort would bring more activity, vitality, and commerce to a tiny downtown (commercially devastated in the 1970s by the chain stores and strip malls of automobile-friendly Central Avenue).

So Halko’s idea is to sell VIP cards. For every dollar a customer spends on a card, they receive the equivalent of $1.20 worth of credit at either restaurant. If I buy a thousand dollar card, I get twelve hundred dollars worth of food: a 20% rate of return on the investment of dollars. Halko gets the cash infusion he needs to build the new restaurant – and since he’s paying for it in 20% tab adjustments, it just comes out of profits. He gets the money a lot cheaper than if he were borrowing it from the bank, paying back in cash over time.

Meanwhile, customers get more food for less money. But wait, there’s more: the entire scheme refocuses a community’s energy and cash on itself. Because our money goes further at our own restaurant than a restaurant somewhere else, we are biased towards eating locally. Since we have a stake in the success (and the non-failure) of the restaurant in whose food we have invested, we’ll also be more likely to promote it to our friends. And since we have already spent a big chunk of money on Comfort’s food, we’re more likely go get food there than dish out more cash for a meal somewhere else. When it gets really interesting is when other businesses begin to accept Comfort’s VIP card and dollars for their services as well. But even in its current, limited incarnation, it’s easy to see how the math of an extremely simple alternative currency works, why its existence gets cheaper money into the hands of people who need it, and how it circumvents centralized control over commerce.”

Change You Can Bank on

Dan Robles — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:35:22 +0000

The Earth changes – it always has and it always will. The most interesting thing about Earth is not rock, it is rate of change of rock. Yet it is this rate of change in rock that created oceans, continents and geographical features. The rate of change in the landscape is what created and affects all humanity; global warming not withstanding.

In fact, the rate at which things change is the root of all financial deals, social interactions, creative discovery, intellectual pursuit, even criminal activity. All value is created and destroyed in response to the rate at which something changes. Since change is relative to time, the rate of change is something, like death, and taxes, that you can bank on.

Money, Knowledge, and Power

As a corollary; the ability to measure rates of change in things is the ability to measure value. The ability to cause rates of change is the ability to create or destroy value. It is therefore in our interest to try and express our world in terms of rates of change. For example:

1 Money, interest, and stock price are deeply related. Therefore, the rate of change of money is related to interest. The rate of change of interest is related to growth rate. The change in growth is monetized through a public market for its stock. Stock price affects money and the cycle continues.

2 Information, knowledge and innovation are deeply related. Therefore, the rate of change of information is related to knowledge. The rate of change of knowledge is related to innovation. Innovation creates new information. And, the cycle continues

3 Attention, attraction, affinity, audience, and action are deeply related to each other. Therefore the rate of change of attention is related to attraction. The rate of change of attraction is related to affinity, etc., until finally, the rate of change in action gets everyone’s attention. And the cycle continues.

Achilles’ Octopus

There are a few problems however. If you remove, corrupt, or disengage any of the components, the cycle fails. To complicate matters further, our three examples are also related: money, knowledge, and audience; stock price, information, and action; etc.

Points of failure can occur at any part of the cycle and it is often difficult to identify which failure caused what effect. Does a stock price fail because the public lost affinity or because information was corrupted? Does an economy fail because there is no money to invest in innovation or because our society outsources its knowledge economy? Does a school system fail to deliver the right knowledge to society because the stock market failed or because there is no public action?

Social Media and the next paradigm of economic development

Social media allows us to express the dynamics of our world in real time and at great speed. Feedback loops are shorter and cause and effect can be more easily differentiated. The data that will be generated through the integration of social media will allow entrepreneurs to identify rates of change of the rates of change! Armed with computer enabled search and analysis algorithms, they can mange these complex new relationships to create value for themselves and their community in a new era of social capitalism. Social media is a higher order calculus.

It will take everyone to accomplish this together but we can create a new landscape for our Earth, ourselves, and our children’s future. This is change we must bank on.

The New Economic Paradigm: Part 7; Monetization of Knowledge Assets

Dan Robles — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:12:05 +0000

The New Game in Town:

We have specified a structure for a new economic paradigm by simply integrating the the knowledge economy into the same structure as the financial system. The result is a completely new way for entrepreneurs to create wealth.

Primordial soup:

A. We specified that Information is the currency that is convertible to knowledge assets and innovation assets through a mathematical relationship.

B. The decimal classification and logic system provides a machine-enabled accounting and inventory system for knowledge assets.

C. The factors of production for the new economy are: social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital.

D. Social Networks provide vetting, perfect information, and self-regulation.

These ingredients allow the spark of entrepreneurship to illuminate the supply and the demand for knowledge assets outside the construct of traditional corporations, government, or academia; instead catalyzing innovation enterprise within and among social networks.

An economy is born:

Entrepreneurs now have all the information that they need for matching surplus knowledge assets to deficit knowledge assets as a means of increasing productivity of these assets in a highly predictable manner. Advances in Social Media will keep the game organized, localized, transparent, self-regulating, and fair. The Unit Business transaction can be assembled in infinite combinations to support countless ‘new-to-this-world’ innovation enterprise.

Show me the money.

Monetization is the process transforming a product or service into a universal tangible currency; specifically, a Dollar, a Euro, Yen, etc. Very few people fully understand how money is created in the first place. The following video series gives an excellent overview of this process. It is highly advised that the reader invest 40 minutes in viewing this documentary:

Money represents future productivity:

In short, money is created from debt. Banks are given the authority by a government through the fractional reserve system to literally scribe money into existence. This money is not backed by gold or silver, rather, money is backed by the promise of the borrower to pay it back in the future.

Ultimately, the value of money is a social agreement; a promise based on an estimation of future productivity. When those promises cannot be kept, the value of economy diminishes. When the promise is exceeded, the value of economy appreciates.

Blood brothers or distant cousins?

Debt and innovation have one very important feature in common; both are a proxy for future productivity. Therefore if debt can be used as a basis for a national currency, so can innovation. Everyone should be willing to honor the social agreement because the currency would not change, only the basis of the currency.

The only way to sustainably create more money is to increase human productivity. The only way to increase human productivity is to innovate.

The Risk Factor:

Our financial system has developed over 400 years a variety of systems, methods and analysis tools to manage risk in monetary transactions. Innovation economics has applied the same system to the management of risk for transactions of knowledge assets. The correlation is as follows:

The Financial Bank: the entrepreneur assumes that they have the knowledge to execute a business plan and then they go to the financial bank to borrow the money. The remaining risks are knowledge related.

The Innovation Bank: the entrepreneur assumes that they have the money to execute a business plan and they go to the innovation bank to search for the knowledge. The remaining risk is finance related.

They hedge each other.

The Virtuous Circle:

The more knowledge you can assemble, the more money you can borrow. The more money you can assemble, the more knowledge you can borrow. With both banks acting together – the risks cancel each other out and an economy of risk free innovation emerges.

Amalgamation of predicted cash flows:

With a computer readable knowledge inventory, diverse communities of practice, a percentile search engine, and the virtuous circle of finance; cash flows associated with innovation enterprise can be predicted much more accurately and with far lower risk than any current innovation system.

Were risk is predictable, a portfolio of innovations can be diversifies so if one innovation fails there is an equal chance that another will succeed and the risks cancel each other out. The predicted combined cash flow of all the innovation enterprises can be depicted as a single large steady cash flow with low volatility.

Call Street:

Much like today’s companies do to raise money for expansion, the innovation bank can issue bonds on the open market. A bond is a debt based on future innovation and will act as the transitional instrument to monetize innovation economy. Options can be sold on futures of innovation enterprise.

For example: a bond can issued by a bank or a government with coupon price of 1000 dollars paying a risk adjusted interest rate and redeemable in 8 years. The proceeds can now be used to fund innovation enterprise which, by definition, are qualified and quantified on the basis of increased human productivity. Investors can buy options on promising algorithms for knowledge assets.

This system is exactly how mortgages are financed through global networks of bonds, options, and hedge funds. The current economic crisis happened because estimations of future human productivity failed to support the estimated value of the assets being represented.

The Innovation Economy is the hedge against financial crisis and consumption capitalism - now and in the future.

The New Gold Rush:

Innovation Enterprise can easily exceed the 7-12% return that is normally expected on Wall Street. Venture Capitalists only entertain innovation expected to return 1000%-5000% return. There is a huge market of innovation enterprise in the regime between 12%-1000% that is currently uncapitalized. If innovation bonds and associated options return only 25% consistently, the flow of global capital will be intense and our nation will be transformed far beyond any current expectation. The opportunity is, however, even much greater than that; Innovation will reflect social priorities rather than Wall Street priorities.

The epiphany.

The epiphany of innovation economics is that technological change must always precede economic growth. Humanity has been going about the process of globalization as if economic growth can precede technological change. This has been the singular flaw in modern market economics that has created the unsustainable system that we have today. The financial instrument of the innovation bond reverses this flaw and will open the next economic paradigm to extraordinary human progress.

Future modules in this series will discuss the implication and specific embodiments of an innovation economy.

Who Owns Your Content?

Dan Robles — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 10:06:44 +0000

The epiphany:

Something very interesting happened when Facebook changed their terms of service. People who use the Facebook platform (for free) organized themselves using the (free) platform to threaten the core validity of the same (free) platform. This could not happen in any other industry.

Saving face?

Ownership is largely characterized by the ability of one party to restrict the access of another party. Judging by the results of this uprising, it seems that for all practical purposes, the users own their content and their impressions no matter what the TOS says. This is a very strong argument for the tangibility of social, creative, and intellectual capital.

Ownership Economics:

The fact that people own and care for their content is what makes Facebook work. Ownership is an extremely powerful force that drives intense participation and innovation. People will attend to their property, improve it, make it valuable, and create value for themselves and those around them. Really, when was the last time you washed a rented car?

Historical perspective:

Most history books present the Homestead Act of 1862 as the product of a wise and benevolent government seeking to reward worthy citizens of a great young nation for populating the vast Western territories. But that is not really true. Most of the land was already occupied by squatters who arrived disheveled, found a nice spot, built their small cabin, and farmed or hunted to sustain themselves. They could not be evicted or charged with trespassing because a “jury of their peers” was also composed of squatters.

Problems arose when squatters could not borrow money to improve the land because they did not hold a title to it. Legitimate landowners could not value their property if the land next door was untitled. Border disputes resulted in gun battles. Stealing was rampant. The children of squatters could not inherit the land without proper title. There was little incentive to produce anything beyond sustenance. When services and capital projects were required to support the increasing population, there was no tax base. Not unlike Facebook, this new frontier could not be monetized.

Wisdom in Government; not always an oxymoron:

Perhaps the greatest moment in government came with the realization that it is impossible to change the behavior of people, rather, the best strategy would be to accommodate what they are going to do anyway. So they legalized the squatters and gave them deed to their land. The occupants could sell or capitalize as they wished. Investment capital flooded the region and entrepreneurs improved the land and created enterprises. The government could then collect taxes proportional to the productivity of the citizens. The result was the development of the Western States as economic powerhouse that we know today.

Use it or lose it:

A very similar opportunity is presenting itself to Facebook and now the road to monetization should be crystal clear. They should go out of their way to create terms of service that protects the rights of each and every member to own and control their content in its entirety, forever.

Next, Facebook should develop applications that allow advertisers to bid for impressions directly with the users compensating them for their time. Users will build profiles that attract those seeking opinion, knowledge, feedback, wisdom AND SALES related to their products. Users should be able to control every aspect of their content including any means that they can dream up to legally create revenue from their social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital. Facebook should develop a knowledge inventory of what users know and make it available to others like a “Public Library or knowledge assets”. Then they should develop applications to match knowledge surplus to knowledge deficit, etc. Let the trading begin.

The answer in their face:

If smart people can make money using Facebook just by doing what they are going to do anyway, they will flood the system with the most tangible forces in nature; social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital. If Facebook can’t figure out how to monetize the asset staring them in their face, they will soon encounter a more powerful competitor – their own users.

The Résumé Must Die

Dan Robles — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:28:45 +0000

Résumé: A French word for separating the body from the brain

If the key words are so important, why have any other words?

While the Ingenesist Project discusses a solution at great length, I’ll just stop complaining and share a few comments (self titled) that I’ve picked off some recent Human Resources Blogs:

***

1. And our future goes with it:

“Most recruiting systems I’ve seen screen out innovators. Any résumé that is unique, different or convention-defying gets surreptitiously put in the junk pile.”

2. Start by looking in the junk pile:

3. What part of “share holder value” are we having difficulty with?

4. Here is my favorite comment – I wish I could hug this person:

***

We have an inventory and CAD model of every nut, rivet, and panel that goes on an airplane – why would we try to build anything without one?

So Please, let’s evolve out of the revolutionary times and develop a real community knowledge inventory. It must be computer enabled and based on a taxonomy that everyone knows and understands. It must be read, analyzed, sorted and vetted by social networks and communities of practice. It must integrate with knowledge assets from anywhere in the world. A self-perfecting algorithm must be developed for a predictive percentile search engine in a pull system that seeks, matches, and deploys the ‘secret sauce’ of success, specific to any application, anywhere, any time – and fast.

Web 3.0; An Elephant Never Forgets

Dan Robles — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:15:14 +0000

The opportunity for America reminds me of the elephant that is convinced since birth that the slender rope tying him to the fence post is stronger than he. When the elephant grows up, he still believes the rope is stronger even though the elephant now has gained the strength to pull the whole building down. Americans are the 8000 pound elephant in the middle of the room. The question on everyone’s mind is: what will the elephant do next?

Throughout history, economists have determined the structure of business, enterprise, and commerce and wisely the government complies. With remarkable success over the last 150 years, corporations had been the source of most innovation sufficient to support the value of a currency. Fortunately, the corporation had become the center of economic policy while the knowledge inventory within them have been fenced inside the accounting term: “intangible assets”. Unfortunately, our corporations can no longer innovate efficiently enough to support the debt. Witnessing GM facing up to this very question, while the government manufactures money like taffy, seems a lot like feeding sugar calories to an elephant that is too big to fit out the door, dead or alive.

What the economists and many of the great visionaries of out time do not anticipate is the emergence of computer enabled society and the tangibility of knowledge outside the corporate structure through developments of social media. Web 3.0 is supposed to bring us a semantic web – a computer program will be able to read the elephant story above and determine whether it is about education, zoology, macramé, Interior decorating, taxidermy, building demolition, or cliché old business metaphors. Perhaps this is our little rope tied to the post as we wait for Mother Corpora to provide solutions. Get a grip, the only computer that can read, classify, and extract a thousand words for any photograph is between our collective big floppy ears. Web 3.0 will be semantic alright, except by the integration and capitalization of human knowledge through social media.

We spend billions on a human genome project to inventory our DNA, but nothing to inventory the knowledge as it exists naturally in society. We will build statistical models to forecast weather, elections, click-throughs, insurance, demographics, and mortgage risk; but nothing to predict the value of various combination of social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital in society. We have search engines that match most worthy blog to most worthy keyword, but little to match most worthy mentor to most worthy apprentice. The top reasons why start-ups, businesses, innovations, and markets fail are due to the wrong knowledge in the wrong place at the wrong time. It seems that if we solve the knowledge inventory problem, then we can solve the innovation risk problem. That, in turn, will solve the money problem which solves the elephant problem. We need to release the great “intangible asset” into the wild world of tangibility and trust that it knows where to go.

Sometimes it just takes someone to give us permission to do things differently. So here I go: human knowledge is the most perfect, predictable, flexible, and valuable capital asset in our world. Knowledge can become far more tangible than anyone could have ever imagined. Information, knowledge, and innovation are profoundly related – separated they are useless, integrated they are wisdom. Everyone on earth innovates every day, period. The vast majority of people will do the right thing given the right incentives. With the next development of the Internet, we will have the tools to organize ourselves in a far more efficient manner than the command and control structure of a traditional corporation. Management can be outsourced too. Corporations respond to corporate priorities, social networks respond to social priorities. Which one sounds like a business case to curb global warming?

The Ingenesist Project specifies three web applications which if developed and deployed to social media will allow social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital to become tangible outside the construct of the traditional corporation and inside social networks. Just because people have never organized themselves in an open sourced innovation economy before, does not mean that they never will. But once they do, well, let’s just say that an elephant never forgets.

The Great Convergence

Dan Robles — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:23:26 +0000

Hey Kids, It’s 3D:

The objective of this article is to discuss the Great Convergence of computer enabled society. Social media must not be allowed to converge to a single apex – rather, it must converge to 3 distinct and tangible dimensions.

The factors of production for the industrial economy are land, labor, and capital. If you lose one, you can’t use the other two to build an SUV, for example. The factors of production for an innovation economy are social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital. All production in the new economic paradigm will result from the allocation of a “secret sauce” of social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital. Again, if you lose one, you can’t use the other two to build anything meaningful.

The congregation of congregations:

In order to find The Great Convergence, we simply need to examine Social Media to discover where social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital tend to congregate.

One of the more obvious illustrations appears to be playing out between LinkedIn, Facebook, and Myspace. Many people use Linkedin for professional contacts (intellectual Capital), other people use Facebook for friends, family and more diverse associations (Social Capital), while many others use MySpace to post videos of their rock band, Artwork, or to discover the latest Mash up (Creative Capital). Of course there are many more social networks, lots of cross talk, different demographics, rants and raves, etc. I intentionally leave this analysis sparse as these conditions simply reflect the nature of The Great Convergence.

The Next Economic Paradigm:

We need to watch The Great Convergence with laser focus and deep personal interest because it will be extremely important for the development of what comes after the knowledge economy. Whatever form this next economic paradigm takes, globally and locally, will depend upon The Great Convergence. The Innovation Economy is the only wrench left in the toolbox for resolving the vast global problems that we face today.

The Innovation Economy must end global warming, restore financial accountability, enact sustainable enterprise, and institute renewable energy – or not. This is a huge burden to ask of the next “greatest generation”. It is clearly in everyone’s best interest to identify, encourage, and support The Great Convergence to form in 3D, before the old single-apex game “resets” and starts all over again, perhaps for the last time.

[The Ingenesist Project discusses this concept at length and identified various predictions, methods, and scenarios, including specifications for an Innovation Economy.]

Finally, A Definition for Innovation

Dan Robles — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:01:15 +0000

[In earlier post we identified the 5 essential elements of a market economy. What would be the currency of an innovation economy? Currency is anything that serves as a medium of exchange, a stored value, and a standard of value. Basically we are asking; What are those things that people are out in the World trading among each other today?]

Today, innovation is repeatedly cited as the only thing that can get us out of the financial/environmental/sustainability conditions that find our ourselves in, yet the most common definitions for this term are deeply and tragically flawed.

Like the 1500’s A.D. definition of the Sun revolving around the Earth, an unusable definition can completely block our ability to see the truth about the phenomena that surrounds us. Let me explain:

Most definitions for innovation boil down to: “a new idea introduced that has an economic outcome” or “something new that is useful”. While these definitions match some observations, they are reflective and “You know it when you see it”. As such, there is little to define innovation before it happens or to make more of it from this definition. It is like defining “Art” as the thing that people stare at. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning of our troubles.

“Innovation is a new idea introduced that has an economic outcome” is impossible.

This definition defines one unknown quantity (innovation) with four other unknown quantities: what is new; what is an idea; what constitutes “introduced”; and what is an economic outcome? From High School Algebra we know that you cannot solve one equation with two unknowns – let alone four. There is little that you, I or anyone else can do to satisfy this definition. Therefore, it is not useful.

Granted, this definition sells plenty of ad copy as the guru of the week wax-poetic over those four pesky unknown thingies. I found one consultant who claims that innovation has 51 variables and only he can solve that matrix – for a price.

What is the truth about the phenomenon of Innovation?

A useful definition must clarify the subject in a manner that is repeatable and measurable.

If we look at history we know that economic “benefit” and innovation are mutually dependent – you can’t have one without the other. Wealth has been created by increasing human productivity through innovation in agriculture, manufacturing, computers, etc.

Next, we observe that information, knowledge and innovation are also mutually dependent – you cannot have one without the other two. Wealth is created by integrating information, knowledge and innovation.

Next; look at our society; everywhere we turn, people are collecting information from each other, building their knowledge, and innovating together, i.e., coming up with better ways to do things. All of these little exchanges obviously add up to something because things like IPods and Airplanes get built and lots of stuff rolls off assembly lines.

Innovation is anything that increases human productivity

Next we can say that information, knowledge and innovation can be related as follows:

Information is defined as facts and data

This should not surprise anyone.

Knowledge is proportional to the rate of change of information (facts and data) over time.

This is a little trickier to grasp. But any good teacher knows that information must be introduced in a certain order and at a certain speed before the information can become knowledge – this is called learning. Learning is a mental process for turning information from a book, a lecture, or personal experience into knowledge that can be used later. Therefore, knowledge is proportional to the rate of change of information and can only exist inside a person’s head.

Innovation is proportional to the rate of change of knowledge over time

trickier still, but for example; everyone has had an ‘Ah-Ha!’ moment during a brainstorming session, some incredible event that we witness, or even after some real bad mistake that we made. The Ah-Ha moment is a spike in our knowledge that happens in a very short period of time. Innovation is related to this high rate of change of knowledge. Then we blurt it out, or write it down, or make a sketch, give a lecture, in the form of information, etc.

Definition of Innovation:

a. Innovation is anything that increasing human productivity.
b. Innovation is proportional to the rate of change of knowledge and information.

Admittedly, not as sexy in the sound bite but this definition does include all conversations, sketches, dreams, and ideas of all people on Earth and allows them to combine with the sketches, dreams, ideas, of all people on Earth to become designs, methods, and processes which further combine to become products, systems, and institutions, etc.

Let entrepreneurs worry about the economic outcome

Since innovation can be difficult to observe directly. Our new definition allows us to use a proxy that is easier for entrepreneurs to see. For example; if you want to identify innovation as it is happening, simply look for high rates of change of knowledge in a community. If you want to create innovation, do things that create high rates of change of knowledge. Likewise, if you want to identify knowledge, look for high rates of change of information. If you want to create knowledge, do things that create high rates of change of information.

We need to give the entrepreneur a game they can win. The key is that everyone must be included in the game. This is a definition that can be used by anyone and everyone, in fact, it already is.

notes:

[Anyone familiar with differential Calculus can see an equation forming where Innovation is the derivative of knowledge and knowledge is the derivative of information. Calculus is the study of change like geometry is the study of space. Since the mathematics is beyond the scope of this article, I'll finish with the following analogy for defining information, knowledge, and innovation more intuitively: “Information is to knowledge is to innovation what distance is to velocity is to acceleration”]

The Next Great American “Hail Mary” Pass

Dan Robles — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:47:45 +0000

The Game

The knowledge economy will be outsourced to low cost countries. There is little rational analysis that suggests otherwise. Information, knowledge and innovation are profoundly connected – lose one and you lose the other two … and so goes our innovation potential. The very technology invented and developed by American knowledge workers is the exact same technology that now constrains them. This is not the fault of corporation or of the financial system – they are behaving exactly as expected; a dog will hunt. This is the limitation of the knowledge economy itself – let me explain.

It is very easy and inexpensive for the rest of the world to just watch what the United States does, copy what works and reject what does not work, and then effectively compete. The rest of the World now speaks English so they can now jump on the Internet and learn everything they need to know about us while we are largely unable to reciprocate. In addition, money is global and does not need a visa to work in another country. All of these things stack up against both the US knowledge and foreign knowledge workers. If left alone, these conditions will not go away any time soon.

As a nation, America is either at the edge of something really good or something really bad. We need to do something so radical, so audacious, and so creative, that the rest of the world will shake their heads in disbelief at how America always comes up with an unbelievable play just when the game looks like it is over. It’s called The Great American Hail Mary Pass.

The Competition

First we must realize that America does not have anyone else to copy or compete with in order to climb to that next rung on the economic development ladder except ourselves. Many Americans are in denial that we too must also develop just like we claim other countries must do. In the past, we have relied on shocks to the global system in order to move forward; usually in the form of wars, but obviously, as a modern innovation strategy, warfare has severe limitations. Maybe we just don’t know how to develop on our own. Perhaps the current financial crisis may be the disruption that we need to see those next few critical steps that we need to take.

The Field

Here are some other historical facts to consider. Like all previous development phases, the next economic paradigm will be derived from the earlier economy by integrating the tools of that earlier economy – in this case, the knowledge economy. We have painfully learned that intellectual capital can be found and duplicated almost anywhere on Earth. However, social capital and creative capital cannot be easily sourced elsewhere. Both China and India have political or cultural constraints on social capital and creative capital – so they cannot compete with us here. This is where the next Great American Hail Mary pass needs to go.

The Team

America has a distinct comparative advantage over most of the World in our cultural diversity, global language, and freedoms of assembly, expression, and association. In addition, and likely as a result, America is inventing one of the most profound technological advancements in human history. One which has the potential to secure American economic prosperity for many generations into the future.

The Play

Social Media has the potential – if we are clever – to allow human knowledge and interaction to become tangible outside the construct of a corporation. The new economic paradigm will have factors of production of social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital, instead of the classical land, labor, and monetary capital model. That means that a team, community, or a social network can be capitalized directly much like a corporation, or any financial instrument in itself, as a means toward increasing human productivity. Admittedly, and as space allows, this is a very vague definition of an innovation economy, but the implications are sweeping and vast. A more detailed structure and description is specified at http://www.ingenesist.com.

The Ball

It is imperative that knowledge workers recognize this opportunity. We must have a national conversation about the next great leap and not just dwell on the current quagmire or roll over while the dark ages set in. It is essential that we recognize our responsibility to ourselves, our communities, and the planet to build a sustainable economy that reflects long term social priorities rather than short term profit taking – this is ultimately in the best interest of even the short term profit takers! Finally, it is our responsibilities to continue developing this great Internet technology that the generation before us created for peaceful, open, and productive means; and obviously never intended to enable a race to the bottom.

Social Media; The Opportunity of a Century

Dan Robles — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 21:17:23 +0000

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 http://www.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.