Archive for Artisanal Economy
by Jon Husband
February 1, 2008 at 2:52 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Business Model, Change, Cloud Computing, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, FASTforward08, Mashups, New Realities, Open Source, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Sustainable Development, Trust, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds
Hot on the heels of the recent post about "The Rise In Collective Intelligence – Decentralizing Co-creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce and Culture" comes the release of a second report or white paper with a remarkably similar title … "User-Led Innovation: A New Framework For Co-Creating Business and Social Value".
There must be something in the water or the air, one would think.
This announcement comes from the P2P Foundation, spearheaded by Michel Bauwens.
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User-Led Innovation: A New Framework For Co-Creating Business and Social Value
This new CRC report reveals the major drivers of user-led innovation and explores how it is affecting organisations’ relationships with key stakeholders.
It investigates how user-led practices generate business and social value through a major case study of the virtual world Second Life. The report canvasses a number of pathways for organisations to leverage the participation of their audiences, customers and citizens in the interest of co-creating new products, services and platforms.
The research draws on extensive interviews with some of the world’s leading thinkers on the social, economic and legal aspects of user-led innovation including: Eric von Hippel (MIT), Yochai Benkler (Harvard), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Siva Vaidhyanathan (Virginia), John Howkins (Adelphi Charter), Michel Bauwens (P2P Alternatives) and Mitch Kapor (Linden Lab).
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The people interviewed, as cited, are certainly amongst those that are seen to carry significant authority in this Internet era. The same can be said of the Aspen Institute Roundtable participants, who included John Seeley Brown , Joi Ito, John Hagel (featured speaker at the upcoming FASTForward08 conference), Tom Malone of MIT, and other clearly credible folks.
At the risk of being seen to be involved in repeated and shameless self-promotion (I tagged this on to the previous post as well), I’d like to tag onto this emerging activity the working definition of wirearchy from a couple or so years ago. I promise I’ll stop soon 
"a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology"
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Tags: Collective Intelligenece, Co-creation of value, new paradigms, peer-to-peer, business models, wirearchy
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by Jon Husband
January 30, 2008 at 8:29 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Business Model, Change, Chris Anderson, Community, Culture, Economics, Emergent, Facebook, Long Tail, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects, Trusted Space, Web 2.0, Web Advertising
A few days ago I wrote a post and linked to an Aspen Institute report titled The Rise of Collective Intelligence – Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce and Culture.
Today I’d like to offer readers an example of new tools and web services operating in social networks that in my opinion make the concepts and observations in the report come alive. The example involves people using search, content, collaboration and sharing, which are all central elements of the ecosystems of commerce and culture in which we will all be living, working and consuming.
There’s a small company up here in Vancouver, British Columbia (the warm and beautiful part of the Great White North of North America) that develops social networking platforms and customized elearning solutions. The Donat Group is also creating a social music initiative (Project Opus), a part of which involves Mixxmaker, a web service that helps music lovers build playlists collaboratively. Building playlists collaboratively creates a "Social Object", offering people a means of co-creating value around music they like and want to share with others they know.
We all know that the music industry is in real turmoil, and is searching frantically for new business logic and new business models. The major participants have all been under pressure from free downloads, and the price of music is under pressure as never before. Where will additional value, and eventually revenue, come from ?
David Gratton is the founder of the Donat Group, Project Opus and Mixxmaker. David recently wrote a post about why the digital packaging around music, especially as a social object, can and will be of value. Mainly, being able to search for, locate, aggregate and acquire various elements about a song or an artist that someone likes will help create meaning and in turn value.
He also wrote about ‘who’ is involved in the co-creation of this new form of value … or in other words how the market for value associated with songs is being broken up and then co-created anew. Doing this around a playlist that is built in collaboration with others also helps mightily in creating connections and trust, and lays a foundation for putting the dynamics of word-of-mouth marketing into dynamic operation.
It’s important to note here that David and his colleagues at Project Opus and Mixxmaker put a lot of work into staying within the bounds of Fair Use, an all-important consideration when exploring new paradigms for creating (or co-creating in this case) potentially new economic value.
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Once people start building today’s equivalent of albums together with their friends, the changes to the ways music is distributed and acquired will continue to diversify away from purchasing CDs, as David has noted. But people will still want that unusual album cover from the old vinyl days, or the most recent YouTube video clip of a given band’s performance, or a series of photos from Flickr (carrying the appropriate Creative Commons license, to be sure) to add to their own personal collection of digital artefacts about that kind of music, that band, that group of friends .. and so on.
It’s a pity, really, that this fun and easy-to-use capability exists only as a Facebook application at the moment. I seem to be observing a rapidly-growing trend of people turning down invitations to add another Facebook application to their Facebook profile (I am one of those people). While supposedly Mark Zuckerberg is aware of the growing dissatisfaction .. and you’d think the Beacon fiasco was notice enough … it’s hard to shake the sense that Facebook and its partner applications are all really just looking for ways to maximize page views and ad impression.
That, for me, does not fall into the category of decentralized co-creation of value, no matter how you spin it.
But .. I suspect that in the coming months and years we’ll see many more examples of applications and services like Mixxmaker that let and / or help people co-create online things that they care about and enjoy.
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Tags: Aspen Institute, Decentralized Co-creation of Value, Donat Group, Project Opus, Mixxmaker, Facebook
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by Joe McKendrick
January 25, 2008 at 12:23 pm · Filed under
Artisanal Economy, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds
Dan Carew responded to my last post on ‘Recession 2.0,‘ in which I predicted that in the event of an economic downturn, people would not be as powerless as they once were, because they will have social networking and other Web 2.0-based tools at their disposal to reach out and grab new opportunities.
Dan is a bit more pessimistic, and said my thinking was based on ‘irrationally exuberant’ boosterism and pollyannishness:
“A stock market crash is going to sink Web 2.0 ships, just as surely as it sinks others. And you gotta be kidding if you think the read/write Web could mitigate, no less reverse it.”
Dan feels that an economic downturn, if severe, may give us more time to blog, or use our iPhones from the soup kitchen, but that’s about it. But Web 2.0 won’t do us much good when the electricity gets cut off.
Perhaps if I’m being too pollyanish, then Dan is being too Eeyorish (remember Eeyore?), and the actual scenario would fall somewhere in the middle.
In a follow-up discussion Dan and I are having, I point out that if and when layoffs hit (and we all know we don’t need a recession for that), people have more options to drive their own fate, versus living on unemployment checks and hoping the company calls them back.
“People can remain well-connected to their professional networks, and leverage tools and potential opportunities that have not been readily available in times gone by. If you want to try to start a new business, the Web offers an abundance of ideas and opportunities — and visibility across the globe. Not a lot of start-up capital is required. The Web is an incredible global tool at our disposal, for very minimal cost.”
But Dan argues that if things got bad, they would get real bad, and nobody will want your Web-based services, period:
“Consumers won’t have extra cash to buy the clever non-essential item you’re selling on eBay or a Web store; companies will be retrenching and won’t be hiring consultants.” And don’t bother casting a net for global buyers, because there won’t be any.
Dan also argues that increased productivity, and the advent of the radio and telephone didn’t help folks back in the 1930s. (Hey, didn’t Franklin Roosevelt’s radio fireside chats at least calm down the runs on the banks?)
My argument is that employees and entrepreneurs don’t have to be victims this time around, in the event of a downturn. We have access to far more knowledge, tools, and networks now than we did in previous times, and this is going to help us not only to manage through tough times, but even identify niches where we can flourish. And if this works for enough people, it could help turn the tide of a downturn.
Readers and fellow posters, it would be good to get your takes on whether Web 2.0 can make a difference if things got rough, or if you agree with Dan that we’re toast, no matter how many social network accounts we have.
by Joe McKendrick
December 7, 2007 at 6:48 pm · Filed under
Artisanal Economy, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, User Revolution, Videos
A song I heard frequently on the radio over the years — but was clueless about the artists — is “Reflections of My Life,” by a group called The Marmalade.
It turns out the song was big in 1970, after which the group — originally from Scotland — faded from the limelight. (A reconstituted band with one of the original members still tours.)
On YouTube, an incredible live 1970 performance of “Reflections” by the band is available, and at the time of this post, was viewed about 157,000 times. Accounting for multiple viewings, it’s likely that at least 100,000 people across the globe now have seen the performance, which up until a year ago was lost to the ages.
It’s now well established that Web 2.0 technologies now provide long tail of opportunity that can stretch into months and even years past the point a product or service was launched.
But are we seeing the long tail extending across multiple decades as well? It’s entirely possible that YouTube videos, for example, are ginning up new interest in long-lost bands and performances (as well as well-known ones, such as the Rolling Stones, U2, and Led Zeppelin), and perhaps increasing current airplay, CD sales/downloads, and thus, re-energizing revenue streams (and royalties) that went dry 30-plus years ago.
They say that the Internet has sped things up, to the point where opportunities and income can be gained or lost in a matter of seconds. But perhaps the extreme opposite is true as well.
What would you call a long tail that thins out into a long, long, tiny thread, then suddenly expands again? Is Web 2.0 delivering the ultimate time-shifted economy?
by Joe McKendrick
September 19, 2007 at 4:01 pm · Filed under
Artisanal Economy, Business Model, Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Web 2.0
The ‘Facebook Economy‘ — that’s what Business 2.0 brands the opportunities that have sprung up around Facebook, the mother of all social networking sites.
Why the ‘Facebook’ rather than the ‘MySpace’ economy? Because, the article’s authors explain, Facebook has opened up its network for developers to build and sell new applications.
There’s a couple of developers, for example, that posted an application that turns Facebook photos into a slide show, and has generated more than $200,000 in ad sales. Everyone is piling on, in fact. The article notes that in just 10 weeks, hundreds of developers launched more than 2,500 new applications, triggering 139 million downloads. Bay Partners, a prominent venture capital firm in the Valley, reportedly has set aside more than $12 million to bootstrap 50 new Facebook applications
Essentially, Facebook has opened itself as a bazaar or online mall of sorts, in which it , starting in May, granted developers the right to hawk applications to its huge installed base of users. In exchange, Facebook becomes a richer environment.
While the enterprise aspect to this is still very limited (the Facebook economy seems to be mainly consumeristic fun-time apps), the model is something worth watching closely. The growth of this phenomenon will result in an area of opportunity at the enterprise level.
First, eventually, such applications on demand will be increasingly targeted at businesses, giving rise to a new breed of “Micro-ISVs.” And, as these applications — or services — become available on the open market, components, enterprises may come to rely more on functions provided through Software as a Service model, versus developing and maintaining everything themselves in house, or handing everything over, lock, stock, and barrel, to a SaaS provider.
Enterprises can then aggregate services on an on-demand basis to meet their own customer demands, or teams or departments within enterprises can quickly assemble needed functionality on an ad-hoc basis. Many, if not all, of such services may be provided from third parties. It is likely, then, that MicroISVs may be the providers of these service-oriented components, perhaps charging on a per-transaction basis. A MicroISV may be an entrepreneur working from a spare bedroom; or it may be a unit of a larger non-IT enterprise as well. Many of today’s enterprises have already evolved into confederations of entrepreneurs and ad-hoc teams on a process level.
Ultimately, we’ll be seeing loosely coupled businesses, run on loosely coupled services. Just as businesses are evolving into loosely coupled components, so to are the systems that support them. Many industry analysts predict that the concept of an “application” will be obsolete — rather, our businesses will depend on services that are combined, mixed, matched, mashed and reused as needed. Over the years, there has been a great deal of angst about the viability of the “hollow” corporation, which links processes and services to customers, but produces nothing itself. Thanks to new technologies, what was a linear supply chain is now close to being a synchronous network, affording better visibility and control over processes.
In fact, more and more solutions are being built collaboratively, paving the way for the creation of modular, standardized building blocks that can be assembled, on-demand, for specific requirements. Application vendors that play the role of “assemblers” — rather than “creators” — can leverage these components and quickly deliver services or components at reasonable prices will have the upper hand in the market going forward.
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