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Creating An Intention Currency

by Dan Robles on January 7, 2011

In the last few articles, I’ve discussed the importance of Intentions as a superior means of storing and exchanging value because of the ability to predict economic outcomes.  Only from these conditions can we construct an alternate currency.

For all Intents and Purposes….

Suppose that we suggest that one’s knowledge inventory is a good representation of their intentions to do things.  You can test this by strolling through the aisles your neighborhood Barnes and Noble book store and observing your own reactions to the titles as they flash by.  Notice how your tendency to act  (stop to read the byline or even pick up the book to read the cover) correlates to your organic knowledge, passion, interest, or experience.  Notice which sections you tend to linger in and how your eyes float up and down through the shelves, etc.

So let’s say that you studied business in college.  We can then say that you have an intention to conduct business.  The same holds true if you studied math, engineering, art, music, creative sciences, and/or social sciences. So we can say that a knowledge inventory is an intention inventory – assuming that you are not distracted by ADVERTISING.

Let’s make some predictions:

If you have low knowledge and high interest, your intentions would correlate to those of a student. If you have high knowledge and high interest, your intentions would correlate to those of a teacher.  If your have low knowledge and low interest, you would register no intentions.  If you have high knowledge and low interest, your intentions are ambivalent.

One step deeper:

If we were to assemble a community’s knowledge and interests on a few bell curves, we could make predictions about what a community intends to produce. If a community has high knowledge and high interest to build airplanes then we can place a value on those intentions in a market.

Now here is where the fun starts:

If we can predict future value, we can create and “intention currency” and capitalize it.  That means that we can turn it into a debt instrument and make a promise to pay back the today’s intention currency with future intentions.  If we can capitalize an intention currency, we can securitize a combined pool of many intentions and sell “Intention Bonds” that finance today’s intentions with those of tomorrow. Meanwhile, as we build the airplane, we have the incentive to innovate and create new knowledge that we can use to pay off the intention debt in the future.

Preoccupied or unoccupied?

If is sounds crazy, be assured that it happens all the time by corporations, marketers, demographers, politicians and even among some prison inmate populations.  Of course they will never tell you this, but unfortunately communities of people, social networks, and all the knowledge inventory sequestered inside corporations or messing around on Facebook have not figured out how to monetize all these intentions for themselves.  This is because they are preoccupied by an influence currency called – ADVERTISING

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You Are The Algorithm

by Dan Robles on May 4, 2009

You are the algorithm.

Google is an information company. Their corporate charter is to organize the World’s information.  Their limitation is that Google cannot organize knowledge because knowledge exists only within the consciousness of a person.   Instead, busy little Google spiders scour the Internet looking for high rates of change of information and they use that as a proxy for “knowledge”.

An economy is crawled

Google Spiders favor blogs because of the high frequency of updates, postings, tags, comments and keywords in comparison to static websites.  The logic goes as follows; if there is a lot of activity, something must be happening.  As a result, an entire industry has grown around the blogging and Search Engine Optimization business; listings are counted, raw data are analyzed, comments provide feedback loops.  Most notably, money is exchanged.

B-school tells us that that ROI can only be calculated from long term future projections, not short-term-recent-past spider activity.  If this “economy” cannot be projected through ROI, then how exactly is it projected?

Dynamic, like life itself

People are figuring out that the rate of change of information is the best indicator of value as well as the best way to create value. The last mile of social media is the next frontier of value creation as people will emulate ‘Google Spiders’ and scour their community for changing information, new ideas, improved information, and feedback loops to organize, categorize, and distribute.  This action will ultimately play out in new corporations built upon perfect dynamic information markets rather than third party selective information markets.  Exit Boston Globe, enter Twitter.

Organize this:

The key to unraveling the Innovation economy will be in refining, restructuring and organizing the profound relatedness between information, knowledge, and innovation.

Information is facts and data – this is the medium of exchange or “the currency”.  The rate at which the facts and the data change is a proxy for new knowledge being created somewhere and somehow. After all, if there is activity, something must be happening.   All of the things that people do with the results creates even more new knowledge – this is innovation.  Innovation creates new information. New currency is created because new information is created.  Knowledge expands.

There is something in it; otherwise people would not do it

We are seeing the tip of the iceberg; social media is the new engine of the innovation economy.  Where information becomes more perfect, markets become more efficient.  Where markets are more efficient, knowledge becomes more tangible.  Where knowledge is more tangible, innovation is more predictable.  Where innovation is more predictable, the innovation risk disappears.  The lower the risk, the cheaper and more abundant the venture capital.

People increasingly use social media to improve information, everywhere, any way that they can dream of.  They increasingly act locally and share globally to create opportunities for themselves and their communities.  People and their behavior is the algorithm of the innovation economy; monetize that. Google did.

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Got a Life?

February 23, 2009

Geographic Compatibility: In the early 1990’s, traffic in Los Angeles was so horrendous, it could take hours to travel a dozen miles.  Commuting was a nightmare and the last thing anyone wanted to do was sit in more traffic.  As a single professional, every time I met a prospective lady friend, I had that elemental [...]

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Who Owns Your Content?

February 21, 2009

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 [...]

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Social Media; The Engine of New Economic Growth

February 19, 2009

If social media can have such a profound effect in the REACTIVE role, what would be the underlying dynamic if applied in the PROACTIVE role ? The great new social media business models of the future will be in the areas of “The Last Mile of social media” and “Social Vetting mechanisms”.

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