The Ingenesist Project

The Next Economic Paradigm

Tag: collaboration

The God App

By

On December 3, 2012

In General Information

David Chacko’s newest mystery novel, The God App, is a story about a detective tracking down the killer of the professor who invented a computer program that anticipates major moves in the financial markets. Whoever holds The God App is far above the law as the people who rule the world come calling for their guaranteed returns. It would seem that the only problem with The God App is for those who don’t have one…sound familiar?

***

If everyone had The God App then no one would have a God App. Today we are at a point where the only way to beat the disease is to lose the patient. As long we are competing with each other, we’ll never figure out how to predict the future, let alone fix it.

First, we seriously need to reorganize ourselves:

Instead of ranking, rating, and organizing each other as winners and losers of things, we need to organize ourselves as students and teachers of things.  This would allow us to exchange value with each other in a pre-dollar proto-economy without necessarily competing with each other.  Teachers would represent supply and students represent demand in a collaboration market.  Here is what the teacher/student scale may look like:

Second, we need to create an inventory

In order to build anything useful or meaningful, we need to have an large inventory of parts that can be easily combined, assembled, exchanged, and inter related.

Today, Wikipedia has grown to become the most comprehensive collection of definitive information about the world around us.  Everyone should rewrite their résumé as a set of Wikipedia URLs that most closely represent their talents, interests, experiences, skills, and abilities.  People will locate their selves on a knowledge graph.

A Wikipedia Cluster Ball –courtesy of Chris Harrison (click to enlarge)

The dimensional résumé:

When we combine Wikipedia Tag with the teacher/student scale, it forms a 2-dimensional array.  This new form of résumé/CV allows communities to store and exchange value among each other.  The CV array may look something like this (etc):

The Personal API

In this 2-dimensional form, everyone would own and control a string of code that represents their willingness and ability to build and collaborate economically in their community.

[tag1](-3), [tag2](+2), [tag3](1), [tag4](-2), [tag5](3),….,etc.  

This string can be processed computationally more like an API than a résumé. Most importantly,  anonymity can be preserved until the point when a transaction will actually take place.

Additionally, people can represent themselves by partial strings to create separate personas. Individual APIs can be combined among many people, and their personas, to create productive teams, communities, and corporations.

Adding dimensions to your API: Attributes such as location, schedule, context, and equipment can be attached in real time or travel dynamically wherever the persona is traveling.

The API Economy

With anonymous source data; everyone can conduct surveys of communities that would likely resemble the proverbial “Bell Curve” or, a normal distribution.  This is important because it would allow everyone the same ability to predict the likelihood that a collection of knowledge assets can execute a particular business plan.  People could see exactly what they need to do next in order to achieve a reliable probability of success in an economy.

Sounds Like Big Brother?

If this scares you, then consider this:  The God App is already here. Everything you do is captured electronically in a very similar form in order to create a predictive profile of you; what you will buy, who you will associate with, who you will vote for, etc.

Political campaigns, advertising agencies, Facebook, Google, Linkedin, corporations, government, Wall Street, and even organized crime (not to be redundant) use big data to gerrymander their way into your productivity potential.  The difference is that 99% are excluded from the predictive process, shackled behind the curtain, detached from their hopes, dreams, and intensions…mindlessly posting résumés, guessing, reacting, etc.

And the Good Lord said unto thee….

Hey dumb ass, wake up.  You can cut them all off at the nub with a simple app that a bunch of hackers could probably code-up during detention hall. Get this sucker viral and build the better FB already. The only way THEY can cut you down would be to cut themselves down.

Now THAT’s a God App.

*** 

(The implications of this app are vast – everything changes without changing anything. Follow-on articles will discuss these various nuances.  Any builders out there?)

Share this:

Evading The Antigen

By

On August 31, 2012

In General Information

Over the last 20 years or so, I have spoken all over the United States and many parts of the world about the idea that there may be a single and relatively easy way to correct very evasive flaw in market capitalism.

Fixing this flaw could correct many of the biases and divisions that plague relationships and communities in an otherwise functional social organization system.  The work of the Ingenesist project, of course, is precisely to correct the flaw.

From past experience, I always get one of three reactions to our work:

  1. Some people get it immediately, and engage deeply.
  2. Some people don’t get it and ignore completely,
  3. Some people attack it, sometimes dangerously.

I learn a great deal from each type of response.  In fact, the vast majority of ideas in the Ingenesist Project come from hundreds of brilliant people who have participated in one of these three ways.  The first two types are self-explanatory. This post is about the third type – I call them “the antigens”. As the term implies, when an Antigen perceive a threat to the existing body they react strongly to neutralize it.

The Flaw in Capitalism is well protected

The antigen is not just a person who disagrees with a fact or feature of our work.  They hold a deep visceral objection that is personal, emotional, physical and always disproportionate to the level, scope, or even the topic of conversation.

Much to our astonishment, the antigen is always someone who would be expected to embrace our work and ideas.

The problem, I have come to realize, stems from the suggestion that the Zertify knowledge inventory strategy seeks to increase the efficiency of matching the supply and demand of knowledge assets in a community. The antigen has a vested interest in this same goal and does not believe that there could or should be a better broker than themselves.

If it’s not Broker, don’t fix it

Several examples of antigens that we have encountered:

One was the economic development agency for a less developed country.  Our proposition was to present their engineers as world class quality.  They saw this as an emigration threat more than an off-shoring draw, and shut the program down.

One was a celebrity author and lecturer that champions the cause of the common man against the oppression of corporate tyranny.  This individual makes his living selling books, lectures, and endorsements. His scathing misinterpretation of our work hurt us badly.

Another recent  antigen was a person who runs an “accelerator” for start-up companies whose passion is to identify promising start-ups and match entrepreneurs to funding in the spirit of high tech titans of the past.  He saw us as a threat to his “God’s Eye” approach to the garden of money.

On the surface, it would seem that these people or entities would embrace a comprehensive knowledge inventory and machine enabled means of matching supply and demand for knowledge assets.  Instead, they saw us as a threat to their vested interests.

It’s not about right and wrong

The point of this article is not to make the antigen wrong about their response –  it is quite natural and we have all done it.  The Flaw in Market Capitalism is the antigen behavior/reaction itself – not the person demonstrating it.  Our challenge for the future will be to amplify mavens and community organizers to become better at connecting people in collaboration with each other while also identifying and redirecting the antigen response before it is activated.  Because once it emerges, it cannot be put back in the bottle.  

The corollary:

Those who would embrace this work likewise have little or no vested interest in “controlling” others and would therefore appear to be the least likely to accept our work.  So by definition, those who accept the ideas that we present are those who would perform well in such an environment.  This further demonstrates the counterintuitive nature of The Ingenesist Project.

Share this:

The Institution Hack

By

On August 23, 2012

In General Information

In the first post of this series, we identified the 5 components of a financial system and suggested that Zertify, Gamidox, and Exoquant would serve to simulate their functions in a parallel economy before being adopted completely.

In this post we will identify a hack to the vetting institutions and players that are supposed to keep the financial game fair but are in fact complicit with it’s unfairness; these include Libor Scandals, Banks, Insurance, The legal system, etc.  Any institution that sets the rules of play, Gamidox will change the rules.

At first Gamidox resembles a classic MBA analysis and strategy tool called Michael Porters 5 Competitive Forces.  In Porter’s analysis a corporation competes within its own business environment against:

  • Competitive rivalry within an industry
  • Bargaining power of suppliers
  • Threat of new entrants
  • Threat of substitute products
  • Bargaining power of customers

The Zertify Hack swaps out the competitive nature and installs a more efficient collaborative nature.  Revisiting Porters 5 Forces for collaboration, we can say the following would be true of the parallel economic system:

  • Collaboration within an industry
  • Collaboration with suppliers
  • Collaboration with new entrants
  • Innovation of improved products
  • Collaboration with customers

This is already happening.

Social Media is driving many social innovations that act as “institutions” would in the legacy economy.  For example:

  • Vendors use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems in nearly every industry.
  • Designers use Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) systems to collaborate Globally.
  • Social Media has spawned the field of Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) where the market tells the producer what to make and how to behave.

Community Relationship Management

But when we combine CRM + SRM + VRM we get Community Relationship Management (CoRM).  In essence CoRM is a Value Game.  Where customers, vendors, and suppliers all acting in the best interest of their constituents are in fact acting in their own best interest.  Cheating gets you thrown out of the game.  The combined analytics provide extensive data to the next hack called Exoquant.

Benign.

Gamidox is an organization that educates, creates, and deploys this new class of business methods where  Communities are encouraged to act in their own best interest when collaborating with other communities.  Jobs are created, things are produced, value is exchanged, and assets are accounted.  Capitalism remains in high gear and the hack will not trigger an antigen.

Playing The Value Game

The Value Game is played wherever 3 or more communities interact with each other to preserve a shared asset rather than consume it.  A Value Game can be built around any sharable asset such as a public corporation, an airplane, a high impact citizen, a condominium building, public infrastructure such as schools, bridges, and health care, etc.

However, A Value Game fails for asset and communities that offer literally no socially redeeming values (that is the point of social redemption, BTW)

The New Value Movement

The Value Game literally manufactures New Value.  As communities interact with each other around a shared asset, they teach and learn from each other – populating the Zertify Hack.  Several layers of vetting and conflict can be eliminated from an economy which will make all many forms of production and associated employment, run faster,  smoother, and more efficiently.

Share this:

Where Competition Has Met It’s Match

By

On June 4, 2012

In General Information

(update; as of November 2012, The Monitor Group headed by Michael E. Porter, the subject of this article, declared bankruptcy ending an era of C-Suite omnipotence strategy thinking.  This article compares competitive strategy to collaborative strategy)

***

The B-School staple “Porter’s 5 Forces” has been the mainstay of corporate competitive analysis since it’s creation in 1979 by World regarded Harvard Business School Professor, Michael E. Porter. Porter developed a model of industry analysis in his seminal book,  Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. 

In short, a competitive company’s position in a market is threatened by five main forces acting on the corporate asset:

  • new competition,
  • substitute products or services,
  • bargaining power of customers,
  • bargaining power of suppliers,
  • intensity of competitive rivalries.

Any changes in these 5 forces would be cause for the company to re-evaluate their place in the market … thus leading to healthy consulting practices for strategists the world over.

The Rate of Change

In the 1990’s critics began to argue that Porter’s 5 Forces thesis assumes that the forces are static and non-related.  At the time, the world was becoming more dynamic and more interrelated. For example:

  • Buyers, competitors, and suppliers can interact, and even collude.
  • Value cannot be created in the long run by constantly introducing barriers to entry
  • Participants in a market have the ability to plan and respond to competitive behavior.

As a result, they added another Force called “complementors” while introducing rudimentary game theory to explain the role of strategic alliances to the analysis.

Constant Change

Now in the year 2012, we routinely assume that all players can instantaneously access the same real-time dynamic market information from the cloud.  We readily accept that all players will collaborate massively with whomever they want from anywhere in the World.  As a result, we must assume that all five forces will change constantly and rapidly in real time.

Now imagine how 1990’s game theory would manage conditions where the company AND their competitors must continuously re-evaluate their position in a market under the circumstances of continuous change.  In effect, nobody has the ability to compete with each other, they are competing with the game, therefore, they are cooperating to keep the game in play.

Is Collaboration Underrated?

If any player tries to introduce a barrier to entry, THEY risk get knocked out while the game continues without them. In fact, value is created by applications that remove barriers … and brokers are punished. All of these factors cause the game to self energize and improve as players preserve the asset rather than consume it.

The Value Game

It should not be surprising therefore that Porter’s 5 forces now resemble what we call the Value Game that we have described here (and here, and here).  In the ultimate manifestation, however, The Value Game will play automatically through multiagent algorithmic game applications where tangible and intangible assets would be accounted equally in a Value Game. Individual would own, manage, and deploy their secret sauce of knowledge assets through their personal API that interfaces with the game that is most relevant to their highest abilities.

Where competition has met it’s match

Remember that little regarded fact of Capitalism: Markets are efficient where there is perfect information.  This means that if everyone involved in a transaction has the exact same information as everyone else, the true supply can meet the true demand.  Nobody ever said that this must be accomplished through competition especially if collaboration can do it better.

Share this:

How Collaboration Distorts Markets

By

On May 7, 2012

In General Information

Adam Smith From the un-encyclopedia

Long before the word “economics” and “capitalism” were even invented, a Scottish social philosopher and political economist named Adam Smith describes how wages are determined by competition between workers and competition between employers – not necessarily competition between workers and employers.

 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

Published on March 9th 1776, The Wealth of Nations, in part,  describes the fundamental dynamics of labor markets at the dawn of the industrial revolution.  In essence, when workers compete with each other for a limited number of jobs, wages fall.  When employers compete with each other for a limited number of workers, wages increase.

He also described what happens when workers decide not to compete with each other; and instead form unions.   Unions effectively distort the market toward increased wages.  Likewise, Adam Smith describes what happens when employers decide not to compete with other employers (tacitly or implicitly) for workers.  This activity also distorts the market, except, towards decreased wages.

Why are we fighting again?

Adam Smith does not mention specifically that these mutual distortions manifests in workers and employers competing with each other in lieu of competing with themselves.  Since the 1780’s, vast resources have been committed to preserving the fight without really questioning why the fight needs to exist in the first place.

A fish has no word for water

One of the ways that corporations form tacit collusion is with arcade job descriptions and skill codes.  When a company or an industry develops its own language, this makes it very difficult for outsiders to enter and insiders to leave.   Yet, this is precisely what needs to happen in order for the diffusion of innovation to flow across the entire economic spectrum.

For example;

A medical instrument manufacturer and an aerospace company and a sporting equipment company would have very different ways of describing the environment that they operate in.  However, an engineer designing a carbon fiber composite aircraft structure would be equally adept at designing a composite athletic prosthetics.  Yet today, engineers from multiple industries are rarely interchanged.  In fact, interchange has been largely suppressed.

Innovation Economics

If workers were able to cross industries they would benefit from increasing employment options and the ability to shift rapidly with economic cycles.  In Adam Smith’s analysis, this would drive wages up.  On the other hand, employers would also have a greater pool of qualified workers to hire, which in Mr. Smith’s analysis would drive wages down. Both would benefit from  increased exchange of  knowledge, access to innovation, transfer of wisdom, and diversification of risk.

If workers and employers could produce the exact same labor relations outcome by collaborating among themselves, there would be no need for the massive infrastructure of social division and political rhetoric that we have invested in preserving the fight.

Public Knowledge Asset Inventory

The Internet has made collaboration and interchange vastly more efficient than competing yet our economic system remains in the 1780’s.  We are watching a public knowledge asset inventory forming outside the construct of corporations.  We are watching corporations begin to index their skill codes to the public knowledge inventory rather than their internal ontologies.

We now need to recognize the importance in which we formulate this public asset.  If we do it right, astonishing value will be released.  If we do not, the invisible hand of capitalism will remain, well, invisible. As such, even a distorted image would be an improvement.

Share this:

The Future Of Money And Technology Summit 2011

By

On January 26, 2011

In General Information

In my opinion, The Future of Money and Technology Summit is among the most important conferences in America.  FOM&T is not the usual parade of polished celebrities selling books, consulting, or seminars.  Here you’ll find the people who work deep in the caldron of innovation enterprise bringing together some of the most important ideas in the world today.

The Moment is now

The challenges for the future are immense, the technologies unfolding before us are extraordinary, and the people on the front lines are visionaries.  For better or worse, future generations will look back on several key moments that marked the beginning of a new era.

Last year I was deeply humbled by the quantity, quality and razor sharp intellect from the audience and the speaking panels alike.  The panels were great, but the audience was just as awesome.  Every question asked of the panelists was as profound and inspired as the panelists themselves.   One common thread binds this conference like no other that I’ve attended:  we’re all in it together. I consider myself privileged to be a participant in this event.

A Portrait of The Future

For me it seemed like 800 pieces to a huge jigsaw puzzle walking around finding their place in a yet unknown portrait of the future.   Everyone has part of the answer and nobody has all the answers – this makes for an extraordinary collaborative learning environment and likely the best place to peer deep into the future.

I strongly recommend that anyone who engages in this conversation of the ‘future of money and technology’ in their work, research, blog, or start-up must attend this historic event.  This is truly an example that the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts, and there are some great parts!

Fight your reservations with your reservation

The Future of Money and Technology Summit will be held on February 28th 2011 at the beautiful Hotel Kabuki at 1625 Post Street, San Francisco, CA.  More details can be found here.

Share this:

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén

css.php