Follow the Trends

• Almost 70 percent of executives around the world say that global social, environmental, and business trends are increasingly important to corporate strategy, according to a McKinsey survey. Yet relatively few companies act on the global trends they think will affect them most; among those that do act, only 17 percent report significant benefits.
• One reason might be underinvestment in trends. For instance, many companies that pursue growing consumer segments in emerging markets build operations there but don’t develop lower-cost products.
• Companies that don’t act on trends they think will be important cite a shortage of skills and resources, higher strategic priorities, or a lack of possible responses to these trends.

Click here for the complete article

The Coming World of Collaboration - Follow up

Howard Rheingold, author of Street Mobs and invited lecturer at California’s renowned TED conference explains the phenomena of collaboration and its evolutionary effect on creating new forms of wealth and perhaps reforms to traditional economic theory. He initially notes that traditional success in both business and politics was fueled by the notion of Darwin’s biological theory of evolution; that the strongest and fiercest survive. But while this ideology has held true throughout the life of capitalism – he’s sure to emphasize that capitalism will continue to rule – the birth and growth of technology has vastly spread cooperation, collective action, and complex interdependencies. This, he notes, has forced competition to make a little room.

What Howard is really trying to get across to us is that through the cooperation, collective action, and interdependencies new forms of wealth can and are being created. In an example he gives early in his lecture he compares this collaboration to prehistoric times when small family units survived by hunting small game like rabbits and other animals. At some point however, hunters gathered together and collaborated to hunt the massive mastodon. His point being that today we can collaborate to conquer bigger “game.”

While the ideas presented could be criticized as rudimentary, it’s no farce that this level of collaboration is occurring today and is being led by some of the world’s biggest corporations. IBM, Sun Microsystems, and other leading IT firms are open-sourcing much of their software and encouraging other developers, be it graduate students or high school kids, to work and advance the available research. Toyota gives extensive training to its suppliers to help them increase their production efficiency even though many suppliers also work with their direct competitors. Even within these fierce markets, companies are opening up and welcoming collaboration. Why? Rheingold argues this is happening because it is a certain kind of sharing in self-interest.

For example, by allowing bloggers to earn money through its Adsense program, Google enriched itself by creating a new market for advertisers. Amazon.com opened its application interface to over 60,000 designers which in turn has grown the number of Amazon stores significantly while making money for virtual store owners. EBay, the auction giant, created an enormous market by creating a feedback mechanism that allows users to trust each other. All these examples reinforce how collaboration can turn a Prisoners Dilemma into an Insurance Game.

The Prisoners Dilemma, as in all game theory, states that “the only concern of each individual player is maximizing his/her own payoff, without any concern for the other player's payoff. The unique equilibrium for this game is a Pareto-suboptimal solution—that is, rational choice leads the two players to both play defect even though each player's individual reward would be greater if they both played cooperate.” The distrust players have for each other in this model is what dictates their rationale. If both could trust each other, they would be apt to work together and obtain larger rewards. This model in which trust is present between actors is known as the insurance game. This is what is beginning to happen. The most evident example of this is EBay. By establishing trust between buyers and sellers a huge new market was established where lower prices are often found for buyers and many new markets for goods that normally can’t be sold are now a click away for sellers.

These actions are all about self-interest to grow and add more to the already existent. Rene Descartes, the famous philosopher explained that we need a new way of thinking to understand absolute truth. While absolute truth would be nice, we can start by understanding the sociological and economic evolution that is the future of commerce and innovation. Globalization is shaking the foundation of traditional thought. To finish, I will leave you with the question Rheingold poses in his book Street Mobs. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be users, like the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread innovation? Or will they be consumers, constrained from innovation and locked into the technology and business models of the most powerful entrenched interests? The answer seems to be getting clearer.

Sources:

TED Lecture – http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/216

Wikipedia: Game Theory & the Prisoners Dilemma –

Trackback: http://grantdeken.blogspot.com/2008/04/coming-wold-of-collaboration-follow-up.html

The Coming World of Collaboration

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action -- and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.

You can learn more about Howard Rheingold and his work by visiting his blog at http://www.rheingold.com/

Trackback: http://grantdeken.blogspot.com/2008/04/coming-world-of-collaboration.html

Young People Embracing Entrepreneurship

I found this survey on Inc. Magazines entrepreneurial section of their website (www.inc.com) and thought I would post it up and see if there's much of a response...

"A recent survey commissioned by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation found that four out of 10 youths between the ages of 8 and 21 either have started or want to start their own business in the future.

Of those who have the entrepreneurial spirit, 92 percent said they want to found a business to use their skills and abilities, 89 percent want to build something for their future, and 85 percent hope that creating their own company will result in a high salary, according to the survey of 2,438 young people.

Overall, 63 percent of all respondents said they think that if they work hard enough, they can start their own successful business. (Source)"

With the amount of information and tools at the tips of peoples fingers it's now easier than ever to accomplish the goal of starting your own business. I'm curious to know who many people reading this are interested in being their own boss some day??