The Next Economic Paradigm

Tag: next economic paradigm

Dollar Pressures Force Talk of New Currency

I am heavily quoting an article below from the DOW JONES NEWSWIRES written By Tom Barkley because this situation leads us into a discussion about alternate currencies in which Conversational Currency is applicable.

We predict that the structure for an innovation economy will be built on a platform of Social Media where conversational Currency is the currency of trade.  We admit that this is a far cry from a declaration of government foreign or domestic, sorry about that.  We also admit this is a far cry from what Corporations, Banks, Insurance Companies and traditional media barons would espouse, Ooops.

The best management policy is to accommodate what people are already doing.  People are ADOPTING Social Media in a frenzy of applications which were not even predicted by those who developed the platforms – this is a reality, not a fantasy or a blip in the radar screen.  Social Media will have an extraordinary role in the value of currency – if people don’t like it, they won’t trade it; Game over.  The next Global Currency will be represented by human productivity traded in social media.  The most productive country will hold the most currency – this is a game that the US can still win.

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)–U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke waded into the international debate over the fate of the dollar Thursday, pledging to do his part to avoid what he sees as a longer-term risk to the dollar’s status as the world’s predominant reserve currency.

[China and Russia have been the major drivers behind calls for an alternative reserve currency, blaming the U.S. for the global crisis and worried that its growing debt load could pose a further threat to stability. That view gained some additional force this week when World Bank President Robert Zoellick predicted that the dollar would face increasing as a reserve currency and its status would depend on how well the U.S. can manage its debt.]

Here is the Social Media Pitch:

[The G-20’s plan to reinforce country measures to address imbalances through peer reviews “would perhaps strengthen the mechanism” for enforcement, he said.]

Social Currency?

At the end of the day PEER REVIEW will be the global vetting mechanism that supports the value of a currency.  What part of Social Currency are we not understanding here?

Share this:

The Winners of War Write the History

Every once in a while the debate on written history emerges through school textbook selection, a controversial act of legislation, or by a historic figure defending their legacy long into what should otherwise be a comfortable retirement.  Even in the age of Social Media, the tenet holds fast; the winners of the war write the history.

Enter Social Media.

Computer enabled society has a way of flipping ideas over on their head.  For example; if the winners of the war tell the history, then the inverse must be true. Those writing history are the ones that win wars.  As traditional news media gasps under the weight of a millions of bloggers, so goes one of the most prominent fortunes of war – the ability to define a culture.  The history still gets written.

“Extra Virtual” Education

Education, like traditional media before it, is encountering their nemesis in the Internet.  The content that kids get on the internet is superior in richness, diversity, and relevance than textbooks.  No longer can school administrators select the material that students must learn. If they don’t agree with the way history is written, they can easily find an alternate history.  They can live in “extra virtual” space – that is, outside the virtual world and inside a chosen reality.  People discover their own culture.  The history still gets written.

Historical Perspectives

Ultimately our new historians need to enter the workforce to decide what to innovate, what to produce, and what to be passionate about.   Where will they find perspective?

The study of history is essential to the three ultimate purposes of education in a free society: to prepare individuals for (1) active citizenship, to safeguard liberty and justice; (2) a career of work, to sustain life; and (3) the private pursuit of happiness, or personal fulfillment.

Expanding Conclusions

Many conclusions are based on a set of assumptions.  The more elaborate the assumptions the more risk there is at arriving at the wrong conclusion.  However, when two opinions are built on the same assumptions and yet their conclusions differ, that difference is a very valuable set of data because it now defines a range of possible outcomes.  As such, the inverse must also be true; there are many possible ways to achieve a solution within the range of desireable outcomes.  This is the domain of the innovation economy.

The True Value of Education

The next economic paradigm will be characterized by many history tellers multiplied by the number of ways to attain the goals of education in a free society; including, but not limited to active citizenship, safeguarding liberty and justice, sustaining life in a joyful career, and the pursuit of happiness and personal fulfillment.

There is only one way to travel a single known path.  However, from the ability to compare alternate histories, the purpose of education is greatly expanded and the value of education is multiplied many times over.  The teacher will become the ultimate entrepreneur.

Ignorance does not win wars, let that history be written.

Share this:

The Second Impression of Social Media

As we move away from the ROI valuation model for social media and adopt a more dynamic ‘options’ analysis, a different picture emerges.  People are trading options; that is, the right without the obligation to exercise an action.  The next economic paradigm will emerge as a function of people exercising their options.

What are you doing here?

On the surface, there appears to be a lot of ‘feel-gooding’ on linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter, etc.  It is easy to brush them off as trivial, non-productive, and delusional.  I often fall victim spending too much time on these devices and have asked myself, simply: “why?”

Computer Enabled Society

At second glance, however, I have personally developed a few extremely profound, important and valuable relationships through “computer enabled society”.  People who I have never met in person have stepped way out on a limb to help me along.  As a result, I have given these people the option to access my network and they have done the same for me.  Our common purpose makes each relevant and valuable to the other and each are willing to support, mentor, and elevate the other.  We exercise options together.

Impressive Results

The distinction is that what once was a “first impression” – firmness of handshake, fashion, and physical appearance – has become the “second Impression”.

What was once the “second impression” – intellect, wisdom, talent and generosity – has become the “first impression”.

People exercise their options accordingly; first impressions leads us to action.

Evolution or Revolution?

Social media does not care if you are rich, poor, young or old, beautiful or homely.  It does not care about the color of your skin, fat or thin, physical ability or disability.  It does not care what kind of car you drive, clothes you wear, or the size of your home. Or does it?

For every revolution, there is a corresponding evolution.

Share this:

What is the ROI for Social Media?

The quick answer is that ROI is indeterminable – get over it.

ROI is a static measurement where financial decision makers look into the Crystal Ball to project a future economic outcome which is then be protracted back into the present to arrive at a value of an investment opportunity.  In case you have not noticed, this valuation method is largely bankrupt.

Like lipstick on a pig

Yet ROI Persists. B-schools teach SWOT; Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats as a means of dressing up our projections with yet more projections.  All the ROI in the world may predict the economic future but as soon as people react to the market condition through improved information in Social Media, all those models fail.  This is called reflexivity and it is becoming a dominant influence in all financial projections in the age of Social Media.

Fortunately, the true visionaries of the next economic paradigm are increasing in numbers and rapidly moving away from the ROI model into something far more valuable simply by asking the serious questions……

Hey, what exactly is the currency we’re using?

David Bullock and Jay Deragon from the Social Media Connection Network are producing a series of videos investigating the currency of social media where they astutely ask the tough questions, “What are people trading?” and “what is a Tweet worth?” While these may seem like simple questions, they have many an ROI expert stumped.

Nobody really cares if I had bacon for breakfast; so the ROI on that tweet is exactly zero.  However, if you get 15 tweets in an hour on the same subject – there must be something important related to bacon today.  The more people sending bacon tweets, the greater is the value of my “option” to react to what looks like a bacon pandemic.  Still, I hold the option, without the obligation, to expend my limited resources in response.

Options have value

The value of social media is counted in options – not ROI.  Social media is dynamic, not static. Therefore “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT)” are also highly dynamic moving targets that are highly contagious in social media and cannot be foretold in the next 5 days let alone 5 years. The cardinal rule of business is to collect assets and reduce liabilities. An option is an asset and an obligation is a liability.

ROI fails.

ROI is a future projection brought to the present.  Options are collected in the present and projected to the future – there is a fundamental difference between the two that must not be overlooked.  People are doing something, they have a plan, they are cooking up a new trick and the ROI is indeterminable…

Options have value and obviously people are willing to pay for them with their time at a keyboard, therefore, they are willing to pay for them through any medium of exchange.  This is what people are doing on social media – collecting options. The Next Economic Paradigm will provide a means to cash in those options. Hold on to your chips, the social media game is far from over.

Share this:

You Are The Algorithm

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.

Share this:

The New Economic Paradigm; Part 5: The Entrepreneurs

There is no shortage of entrepreneurs in this world.

6 Billion of them wander the Earth looking for assets that exists at a low state of productivity waiting to be elevated to a higher state of productivity.

The entrepreneur must first be able to identify an asset as an asset.  Next they need to identify the lower level of productivity and they need to be able to imagine the higher potential level of productivity.  The entrepreneur must identify and manage some risk, perform leadership tasks; and as a result, elevate the asset to the higher state of productivity.  Profit is the difference between the lower and the higher state – minus expenses.

Unfortunately, today this process starts at the forest and ends at the junkyard.

This is how our economic system is organized.  The next economic paradigm flips that idea over.  Instead of accounting for natural resources as the tangible element and human knowledge as the intangibles element; the next economic paradigm must account for the natural resource as the intangible element and the human knowledge as the tangible element.

The current problem is not that knowledge is intangible; rather, knowledge is simply invisible.

The Ingenesist Project will make knowledge assets visible by provisioning all of the information that an entrepreneur now needs to identify the knowledge asset and the associated states of productivity.  Entrepreneurs can then increase human productivity using knowledge assets applied to natural resources, instead of natural resources applied to consumption.  The implications are vast.

Returning to the financial analogy:

With a financial bank, the entrepreneur assumes that they have the knowledge required to execute a business plan and the go to the Financial Institution to borrow the money.

With an “Innovation Bank” the entrepreneur assumes that they have the money to execute the business plan, and they go to the innovation institution to borrow the knowledge.

While this may sound trivial, the implications are vast:

1. A virtuous circle now exists between society and the financial system
2. Profit is derived from increasing human productivity not natural resource exploitation.

Economics is the science of incentives:

A financial Bank seeks to match a surplus of money with a deficit of money.  It is in the best interest of the bank to find rich people who will not need their money for a while, and poor people have the best likelihood of paying the money back in time.  The process assumes that the borrower has the knowledge required to execute a business plan when they seek to borrow money.  However, that FICO score does not measure knowledge explicitly, so little incentive exists to make it tangible.  All of the top ten reasons why businesses fail are due to failures of knowledge.  The financial system is collapsing under the weight of failed knowledge.

By contrast, the Innovation Bank seeks to find people who have a surplus of knowledge and people who have a deficit of knowledge about what they intend to produce. The innovation bank then uses a series of statistical calculus (the same calculus as the credit/insurance/risk management professions) to match most worthy surplus of knowledge assets to most worthy deficit of knowledge assets.  Here, the opposite assumption is made; everyone assumes that the borrower has the money required to execute the business plan and they go to the innovation bank to borrow the knowledge.  People have an incentive to accumulate knowledge.

Simplicity that defies comprehension:

The business plan for the new entrepreneur is deceptively simple to do and nearly impossible to monopolize; anyone can do it not just the wealthy and their chosen few.  The next 3 modules will outline how new enterprises will be constructed from the virtuous circle created between the financial bank and the innovation bank.  This changes everything …. and did I mention that the implications are vast?

Share this:

Page 2 of 2

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén

css.php