The Ingenesist Project

The Next Economic Paradigm

Month: March 2009

What Comes After the Knowledge Economy?

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On March 25, 2009

In General Information

The Ingenesist Project was featured in this video for Social Media Connection Broadcast Network produced by Jay Deragon. This is the first of many videos that we will be producing in order to explain what the Ingenesist Project is and why it is so important.

The Innovation Economy is the next level of economic development following the knowledge economy.  It will not be induced by corporations, Wall Street, or even the Federal Government.  This is something that we must create for ourselves as a social movement.  Social Media will play a pivotal role in this next economic paradigm.

Please watch this video and send any comments, questions, or ideas for future broadcasts about the Ingenesist Project.

I would like to thank all of our contributors for their endless support.

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Are we competing with the truth?

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On March 21, 2009

In General Information

The blogs are going wild, the headlines are snappy, and late night comedians bristle with glee.  First it’s a $165M payout to AIG executives, now it’s AIG’s $75M lobbying campaign and payout to the politicians who were supposed to vet them in the first place – and the majority of the beneficiaries were Democrats!

Far greater crimes have been committed in the financial meltdown, but this one is catching fire and it’s trying to burn the house down.

As if fanning the flame, Obama loosens the reigns on the Freedom of Information Act, publishes bailout beneficiaries, identifies stimulus projects, opens doors to Iran, health care, education, and forces earmarks front and center. He is taking political bullets from all corners, but so is everyone else – nobody is safe.  Not even Rush Limbaugh; now neutralized and tossed in the surf like a beached whale.  People flood to social media, traditional media fails. When everyone is to blame, the finger points backwards.

So the competitors are actually cooperating; with the right information everyone has the incentive to make the game fair (and the highest probability of surviving).

By far the most important job in any sport is a referee.   The referee wears the black and white stripped shirt in order to contrast with visual information in the field of play.  They blow a whistle in order to contrast with the audio information in the field of play. They stop the game if the rules are violated in order to contrast with the dynamics of play.  If a violation is too close to call, they consult the slow motion replay.  Both sides agree to play fair and to obey the referee or else they get thrown out of the game. Contrast is good.

Obama is relentlessly pushing as much information onto the playing field as he is pushing money.  Could it be that information and money are related in some inherent way?

Innovation is the science of change and economics is the science of incentive.  Information, knowledge, and innovation are profoundly related.  High rates of change of information yield higher rates of change in knowledge inducing still higher rates of change of innovation.

There is nobody to blame except the truth.

What Obama is doing is irrelevant to a manufacturing economy because market forces are a sufficient vetting mechanism for product quality.  It is also irrelevant to the knowledge economy because that is destined to be outsourced.

However, Obama’s actions are definitive for an innovation economy.

Not unlike the financial meltdown; the only ones who don’t see it coming are the ones who don’t want to.  Are we competing with the truth?

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I Am Capitalist and So Are You

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On March 16, 2009

In General Information

In case you have not noticed, it is largely in the best interest of one group of people to keep another group of people poor, weak, and disorganized.  I’ll let the reader connect these dots as they see fit, however, the fact is that is how capitalism works – there must be a merchant class and there must be a working class.  And even after all the inequality that this arrangement implies, capitalism is still the only game in town for creating and distributing wealth.

As the burden of supporting the capitalist system is increasing with interest on debt that can never be funded, the pressures on the working class will enter a phase of rapidly diminishing returns.

The Poor:

The inherent conflict is that the working class will always seek to maximize their wages and the merchant class will seek to minimize those wages.  Inadvertently, there is a suppression of information, and therefore education, to the working class.  The result is a net loss of intellectual capital.

The Weak:

The inherent conflict is that the working class is assigned the tasks of carrying out the wishes of the merchant class even if it is not in their own best interest.  Inadvertently, conformity becomes a survival strategy for the working class.  The result is a net loss of creative capital.

The Disorganized:

The inherent conflict is that the working class will organize themselves into collectives as a means to match the relative power of the merchant class.  Again, inadvertently, if people are held below a certain economic threshold, they will fail to organize because their concern is greater for simply feeding their family.  The net result is a loss of social capital.

Diminishing returns

The result of the net loss of social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital is the inability to create new wealth. While these conditions were once the exclusive domain of less developed countries especially under communism, similar conditions are now arising in the United States under capitalism.  That is, before Social Media was used to enrich, empower, and organize.

I am a capitalist:

The tools of the old merchant class trade are eroding. As the financial crisis envelopes the United States, more and more people are turning to Social media.  Traditional media is over commercialized, polarized, and gentrified while the audience can now control their bandwidth, seek multiple opinions, and become highly diversified. The draw to social media is nothing less than extraordinary even among those who still have jobs.  When people are released from the clutches of the merchant class, they wake up, look around and inspire each other. The innovation economy is upon us.

Innovation Economics

The paradigm shift is really quite subtle.  It behaves as a function of the human embodiment of innovation.  For example; most of us do not wake up every day aspiring to improve the Ipod, the Wii platform, the better mousetrap, or any other inanimate object for that matter– instead, we seek to improve ourselves, and by extension, those around us. This is the self embodiment of innovation – something improved with an economic outcome. To improve one self is to innovate; social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital are the factors of production and social media is the corporate structure.  I am Capitalist and if you have read this far, so are you.

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Social Capitalism Predictions 2020

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On March 16, 2009

In General Information

The purpose of this video is demonstrate the scope of influence that Value Games may have in communities.

Each of the following predictions suggest disruption to a current way of storing and exchanging value.

With disruption comes opportunity.

If you are a developer, entrepreneur, or angel who wants to become a co-founder for anyone of these predictions, let’s build the associated Value Game together.  Some are currently under development.

Ultimately, social, creative, and intellectual capital will emulate land, labor, and financial capital of legacy economics.

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The Fertilizer Economy

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On March 15, 2009

In General Information

The bad, the good, and the ugly

The bad news is that United States has a global comparative advantage in producing bullshit. The good news is that we may actually be able to till it into fertilizer for the Innovation economy.

America’s financial crisis was caused by money created from money which was in turn a derivative of wild-eyed speculation in assorted proxies for real productivity, including real estate.  Stock prices were supported by imperfect information in a Tickle-Me-Elmo culture while broker fees are embedded in every conceivable transaction.

America has become a world leader in hype, marketing, lawsuits, and fantasy. None of these industries actually produce anything yet nobody can say they are not immensely creative, induce sweeping social movements, and their propagation demands extraordinary intellectual resources, flexibility, and adaptability.

The Theory of Comparative Advantage

It is not efficient for, say, Ghana to produce rice and Vietnam to produce cocoa. If they each produce their natural endowments and then trade the differences, fewer resources are expended to produce more goods.  This theory is the basis of global free trade and the efficiencies are irrefutable so globalization is here to stay.

Meanwhile, the literature on the subject of innovation agrees that innovation is maximized as a function of endowments in social capital, creative capital and intellectual capital.  Silicon Valley is widely held as the poster child for emerging from the deep social movements of the 1960’s attracting an inflow of diverse people where high tolerance, creative art and music were abundant in close proximity to intellectual centers of Stanford and Berkeley.

Comparative Advantage for Innovation:

By the theory of comparative advantage, if a country does not possess a comparative advantage in intellectual capital, creative capital, and social capital, they would not hold a comparative advantage in an innovation economy.

For example; China has a huge endowment of intellectual capital and throughout history they have been an inspired creative force.  However, the current government thwarts social capital.  Therefore, whereas China has a comparative advantage in a manufacturing economy, they would not necessarily have a comparative advantage in an innovation economy.

Many other countries have endowments of intellectual capital as well as democratic governments, but cultural norms may still constrain diversity related to gender roles, social classes, lifestyle tolerance, or the acceptance of “outsiders”.  As such, they may have comparative advantage in a knowledge economy, but the relative deficiency in creative capital would inhibit a comparative advantage in an innovation economy just as quickly.

The Fertilizer Economy:

That said, the United States has a vast abundance and tremendous economies of scale in social capital, intellectual capital, and creative capital in comparison to any other country in the world.  The problem is that these assets are sequestered behind the corporate veil, suppressed from true wealth creation by the priorities of a financial system built to produce nothing except analyst expectations.  Like sugar calories, lots of energy is delivered, but sustainable health is not.

The harvest in the wind

The brokers, speculators, and marketers are not bad people – in fact, they are brilliant.  They are simply stuck with the wrong set of incentives.  The Ingenesist Project dramatically changes the incentives and promises a far better allocation of intellectual capital, social capital, and creative capital.  By making such assets tangible outside the construct of the Wall Street, the comparative advantage of the United States in an innovation economy will be astonishing.

Where there is fertilizer in the wind, Wall Street will lead. Where there is a harvest in the wind, Wall Street will follow.

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Putting the System Back into Social

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On March 12, 2009

In General Information

Social Media is a demanding master with the uncanny ability to determine the absence or presence of checks and balances.  As a self correcting market, what you do not say can have a greater impact than what you do say.

Of Profit and Peril:

There are great perils in getting social media wrong and great profit from getting it right.  Kids posting negative images can be haunted forever.  Corporations hawking wares can erode their brand. Egocentrics touting their own magnificence can find themselves isolated.  Yet every day, people are controversial, people are selling stuff, and there are is no shortage of egomaniacs in social media space – what are they doing right?

Family Values:

Corporations and individuals are finding out that the social media space requires a much larger degree of disclosure than traditional media simply because markets are most efficient in an environment of perfect information – that is, when the buyer and the seller have the exact same information as the other when negotiating a transaction.  Only then can the magic of supply and demand arrive at one correct “valuation”.

By contrast, an inefficient market of imperfect information cannot arrive at a true price, rather, somewhere in a range of prices.  This is defined as volatility.  When the price is unknown, transactions fail to occur, and markets devalue.  Volatility is the enemy.

Perfect Strangers:

As entrepreneurs have increasingly perfect access to information, it is no longer a successful dominant strategy for corporations to withhold information.  The corporation no longer competes with their nearest competitor; they compete with perfect information in the reputation market.  So what may seem like the wisdom dance of an enlightened industrial complex is really a shrewd and long overdue acknowledgment that perfect information is in the best interest of everyone.

Neighborhood watch organization:

The next step for Social Media will be the most powerful manifestation of perfect information ever to be crowd sourced; systems of checks and balances.  Where checks and balances are in place, information improves.  If not, information decays.

An easy way to determine the presence or absence of checks and balances is to remove one element form the relationship and see if the other two become disassociated.  Inversely, one way to creating checks and balances is to associate two elements by means of a third:

Triangulation:

1. Information, knowledge, and innovation;  Without one, the other two have little value.
2. Social Capital, Creative Capital, and Intellectual Capital; Without one, the other two have little value.
3. Openness, communication, and accountability; Without one, the other two have little value.
4. Trust, self expression, and connections; Without one, the other two have little value.

Etc.

Putting the System back into Social

The difference between success and failure depend your ability to systemize the social media presence.  Sound confusing?  It shouldn’t be. When you think about it, there rules are not much different between managing social media relationships and off-line personal and business relationships.

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Is The Banking System Corrupted?

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On March 9, 2009

In General Information

The following video series is one of the most important videos that you can watch right now. These were published in 2006 but it’s the best place to start understanding the current crisis. It will also give you an understanding of what Barak Obama is doing and why.

Finally, after viewing these videos, you will have a greater understanding of what money is, what the future holds, and why the Ingenesist Project is therefore so Important.

Part 1/5; Cartels Robbing the Public

Part 2/5; How Money is Created

Part 3/5; Money Is Debt

Part 4/5; Monetary Reform

Part 5/5; Warning About the New World Order.

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Creative Credit Crisis

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On March 1, 2009

In General Information

“Luke, use the Force”

Creativity is a mystery to many – like an invisible force that drives the universe but can only be seen in retrospect.  If so, then Hollywood is the master of retrospect.

Most movie viewers think that the credits at the end of a movie are for their benefit.  Then they get frustrated when the print is so small and scrolling impossibly fast.  Actually, the credits are for the benefit of Hollywood. This is their knowledge management system.  They know how to communicate the Force.

“Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more”

Being listed in movie credits is by no means an easy task. Every creative job from lead actor to hairdresser has a category. It often takes many years, serious peer review, and marketable success.  However, once listed in the credits you become a managing partner, shareholder, and a currency in the Hollywood creative capital inventory.  This inventory is captured and categorized in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).  This is their resume system.

As a credited creative worker, you are forever on public display; a good movie credit reflects well on your credits and a bad movie may reflect poorly.  You need to be somewhat selective over what projects to work on.  Likewise, everyone will check the credits of others that are working on the project.  Everyone cooperates fully and in the best interest of the production.  It is in everyone’s best interest to be correctly allocated in the creative capital pool.

“Here’s lookin’ at you, kid”

It’s all about who knows you. The Producers proactively seek and test the “secret sauce” for communicating drama, comedy, action, etc.  They reflect on past projects then attempt to capture strategic combinations of creative capital assets for future projects.  The project becomes the people. The people celebrate each other on award nights and through tangential media. They adopt technology, share ideas, and diversify readily.  As a result, creativity and innovation are quite predictable.

“You’re going to need a bigger boat”

Contrast this to the traditional American Corporation – the ones that we expect to float us out of this financial meltdown through vast new wisdom, creativity, and innovation.  Most are top-down command and control operations with many layers of management that all have the power to say “no”, but not the power to say “yes”.  Instead of arriving at the best decisions, they often arrive at the least-worst decisions.

“Theater is like a box of chocolates”

Now, reflect on this nascent social media industry unfolding all around us.  Readers harvest new ideas on public display from all over the world and apply them to local products.   Such products, by definition, reflect the goals, aspiration, talents, and interests of the people who create them.  The content improves information shared by many sources.  Content of merit with enough credits can elevate the author to the status of “thought leader”.  But something is still missing.

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate”

Social media needs a definite product that the whole industry can rally around – that product is ‘communication’.  Social media must produce, improve, and deliver communication. Very few problems are created by communication but many problems are solved with communication.  Communication improves information, knowledge and innovation.  Solved problems are defined as innovations. It is a simple matter of how we organize ourselves;  as a creative industry or as a control industry.

Credits:

Star Wars

Wizard of Oz

Casablanca

Jaws

Twitter

Cool Hand Luke

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