When I use the term “Innovation Bank”, people conjure up the image of a cheery place where anticipation reigns as starry eyed depositors arrange their intellectual property in neat cubby boxes, Patents are peddled like newspapers, and flush pocket companies troll the halls looking for a cure for their bottom line reflux disease.
This is not exactly what we have in mind, nor is it too far off either. An innovation Bank is simply a knowledge inventory that contains knowledge assets that exists in the format of a financial instrument between people’s ears and can be deployed for the purposes of increasing productivity. Oh, by the way, knowledge makes more of itself every time it is deployed …. Interesting?
The Assumptions
This is not much different than a financial bank. In fact, in the financial bank, everyone assumes the borrower has the knowledge to execute the business plan and the bank lends the money. Oh, by the way, the money makes more of itself (interest rate) every time it is deployed.
With the innovation bank, everyone assumes the entrepreneur has the money to execute the plan, and the seek to borrow the knowledge. Other than that, they can be considered identical. The key is in the scope, depth, and format in which the knowledge assets live in a community as well as the ability to track and preserve the creation of new knowledge in a community.
A Virtuous Circle
Together with the financial banking, these two system engage in the dance of the virtuous circle of innovation enterprise. Apart, they collapse into the swirling cesspool of eternal debt and infinite interest (pun intended).
I recently received an email from a major on-line publication collecting “Letters To The Gulf”. I wondered, What would the Gulf Say to Us? That question sounded familiar so I dug through some old video tapes looking for that long-lost club gig from my days in the Hollywood Rock Band Circuit back in the Late 1980′s.
This piece is called Song For the Sea and it was written shortly after the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 and amid controversy over illegal long net fishing practices. Lance McCormick is playing Bass and Keys, I am on Drums, and Phil Felicia is on vox and axe. It is pretty interesting how timeless this theme is.
Interesting features:
Phil uses a can of Tuna as a slide to make the sound of expiring whales and sea life. His guitar solo is an enactment of a tuna fish thrashing in it’s final moments of life. I remember that I could barely contain myself, it was so funny to watch – I almost fell off my seat in hysterics every time Phil did the part – but it was powerful imagery especially in later shows after we worked out the shtick a little better. I think we all took stabs at the lyrics. Keep in mind that this was 20+ years ago in Hollywood California – the objective was to be offensive, shocking and controversial so don’t get too riled up over our choice of words. On the other hand, they do contain an interesting historical perspective from a bunch of kids (transcribed below) in the late 80′s. The band was called “Rage In Eden”, affectionately named after Gulf War 1
So here is a blast from the past in loving dedication to BP and the gang ***STRONG LANGUAGE ADVISORY***
Song For The Sea
Welcome to my Universe
Once the mighty sea
Turned dumping ground
for all the pigs to see
Now I’m left here in your waste
drowning in your own disgrace
(let’s do it)
Spilling Toxins in my Sea
My putrid flesh bears the stench
of your rotting soul
So I put it to you
Mr. Politician Man
Whatever Gave you the right
To come and punish my world
With your – (indiscernible) – high and low
All I live for in my life
Is just a paycheck to you
So I put it to you, Mr. Businessman
Whatever gave you the right to Punish my world
Dogs dig in my shores
Dollar Whores
I need you to taste the decay and waste
we sold you, yeah
So I put it to you, Mr. judgment man
What ever gave you the right
to punish my World.
I’ll be speaking at the following event on June 4th. If you are in the area or blogging issues in this genre of ideas, let me know and drop by. Look up the other speakers and you’ll find an extraordinary group of visionaries preparing to make this PM Cluster Summit a truly enlightening event.
Money is a convenient way to store and exchange value. Unless the world enters into a free trade agreement with Martians, Earth is the physical boundary of all existing value.
In Tara’s book, Whuffie is roughly synonymous with ‘new’ social capital – a hugely complex financial instrument that is currently emerging before the eyes of all practitioners of social media. In 2010, almost everyone still struggles to articulate social capital with a 1999 vocabulary of new conversations living in old financial markets
Every municipality, chamber of commerce, economic development agency or anyone claiming to politically liberate or conserve anything in America should be looking at solutions designed and developed by visionary social entrepreneurs and community leaders like Micki Krimmel and NeighborGoods.
Very few discussions about the future of money approach the subject with as much experience, introspection, and clarity as this historic panel has. This is not another doom-gloom room – but a truly optimistic model of a future financial system built on a platform of social media. These panelists represent some of the top thought leaders, visionaries, and practitioners in the area of “Local Social” – where nothing happens until the rubber meets the road.
There are two sides to the Social Value Equation – the creation of social value and the destruction of social value. There are countless examples where innovation destroys the value of prior technologies. There are also many instances where “progress”, perhaps in the form of a freeway or public structure, divides a community where strong social bonds once acted.
Tweet It seems ironic that people are using Facebook to urge others to quit Facebook. If they take their own advice, they would no longer be able to give their golden advice to others. If we took their advice, we would not be able to heed the advice of others in this matter. Is Facebook [...]
If necessity is the mother of invention, then the Future of Money and Technology Summit 2010 was Paul Revere. There were many innovations that seek to change banking as we know it using a new denomination called social currency.
Suppose I was to suggest that value stored in social currency may exceed the value stored by financial currency. The paradigm shift now becomes, who quantifies whom?
I am astonished that people willingly and freely give up huge volumes of information about themselves when they really don’t have to. In earlier times, marketers and advertisers would pay a great deal of money for far less information that people give them for free. People do not understand the value that is stored between their ears or how easy it would be to set up an alternate economy that trades in social currencies.
All of this tells us that Social Media is up against the ropes on the monetization plan. As a result it is starting to consume itself. This may be the first indication that the Dollar is NOT the currency of trade in the social media space, it’s a yet unnamed Social Currency. This definitely tells us that something new must happen soon.
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.
A criminal can steal your time, labor, intellect and possessions, or they can just steal your social agreements and replace them with a social disagreements.
Whoever said “Time Is Money” got it backwards. Anyone who still believes this is now moving backwards in economic time. Reality is simple: Money is time.
Regardless of what you call it, all social currencies have a very unique characteristic that differentiates them from a financial currency. Social currencies reward high integrity and punish low integrity.
Global Social and Local Social each have a different focus, different vetting mechanisms, different advantages and often disadvantages. Each has different rules of engagement, different social expectations, and different long term / short term memory standards. Each has a different cadence, stress valves, and damage control systems. The more you look at them, the more different they are.
The Next Economic Paradigm is arriving and the first entries include Foursquare. Few people understand the significance of this new class of social media applications. Foursquare contains many (but not yet all) of the components of the Innovation Economy that we have been discussing for several years at Ingenesist.com, Conversationalcurreny.com, and Relationship-economics.com.
Corporations may be getting social “online” but how are they doing offline? Anti-social behavior on the ground is the genesis of our not-so-coveted Social Caterpillar Award.
The financial system that we live in today is allocated to us all through chunks of Land, Labor, and Capital. It should be fairly obvious that there are some issues with land (real estate bubble), Labor (high unemployment/out sourcing), and Capital (financial system meltdown).
Now, all of a sudden, a new idea is emerging…it’s barely an audible chirp, but it will become a tectonic rumble before long: Social Media is beginning to take on the characteristics of Financial Instruments.
Future of Banking
