Weekend Reading: A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution

Weekend reading is truly a gift. Just had a chance to read Umair Haque's "A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution," which is a must read. Before reading he suggests you first read his guest post at Leading Green on new DNA first.

Finally, a call to arms upon all of us in this new frontier of the Web! Time to really push our latest innovations like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube into the direction of actually harnessing their power as tools of change.When we develop or invest in new technologies, especially web-based tools, we have to push ourselves a little harder than we are right now. How can we use Twitter to fight global hunger? How can mobile video rapidly share knowledge and information in third-world countries?

We can't take for granted that we benefit in the US from an incredible financial market system that rapidly allows for capital to be raised developing a product or service out of little more than an idea. We have a competitive advantage in innovation in this country. Unfortunately, we also have a very US-centric worldview, or at best a first-world one. We can do better than that. We can design the next wave of innovation with a broader world in mind. It's not just that we should, but we absolutely must.

Excerpt from Umair's post:

How do we begin reorganizing the industrial economy? By using markets, networks, and communities to alter the way resources are managed: to weave a fabric of incentives for sustainable growth and authentic value creation into the economy - a new economic fabric that’s meaningful to people.

Google utilized a market - AdWords - to utterly eviscerate a stale, broken media value chain. Here's a more visceral example. Muhammad Yunus revolutionized finance - not by collecting more money to lend, but by using communities to fundamentally alter the value equation of lending to the poor. The result was industry transformation.

See the similarity? Two vastly different industries - finance and media - were both revolutionized by new DNA. It was new ways to organize and manage that exploded the boundaries of value creation.

The revolution needs revolutionaries. Today’s investors, boardrooms and entrepreneurs are looking for value in all the wrong places. Facebook's game of musical chairs won't solve big economic problems - and neither will making token investments in greentech.

Where is the next industrial revolution crying out for revolutionaries? Simple: in industries  dominated by clear, durable, structural barriers to efficiency and productivity.

The next industrial revolution begins here. What happens when we think of using new DNA to reorganize structurally inefficient industries? A blueprint for the next industrial revolution emerges. Here’s what it looks like.

Organize the world's hunger.
Organize the world’s energy.
Organize the world’s thirst.
Organize the world's health.
Organize the world's freedom.
Organize the world's finance.
Organize the world's education.

Comments

[Ethan Bauley]

One of Umair's most slept-on greatest hits is the "Markets, Networks and Communities Briefing (with Innovaro)" that's posted on Bubblegeneration.

I had to read it a few times at various points over the last 18 months to really get where he was going with it. Since then it's provided some very useful heuristics for designing businesses, marketing strategies, business models, etc.

[Marc Hustvedt]

I had it forwarded to me a while back and have been meaning to give it a more serious look. Great point on Wikipedia: "Wikipedia is radical because, by using a
community, it has hit upon the fact that communities can organize the production of knowledge resources more efficiently and often than core-focused firms – an innovation that open-source software innovators pioneered."

Thanks Ethan for the link to Bubblegeneration, I added them to my blogroll and Reader.

Marc

[Ethan Bauley]

I'm glad that was useful!

If I were to distill down a lot of his ~2006 work, it would be: firms aren't that productive; firms should instead create or maintain markets, networks, or communities to create maximum value.

As he said in a BGen post, these are the new bottlenecks in the network economy.

If you buy into that, there are is a whole host of implications that he's gone into.

In general, the science and passion that he brings to network econ and strategy has been really inspiring for me.

To connect this back to your original post, check out this 6/24/08 Washington Post article on Al-qaeda's Internet strategy...I'm completely dumbfounded. A truly awesome story:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/23/AR2008062302135.html

Organize the world's freedom?

- Ethan

[Paolo Piccolo]

Greetings from Italy, a different point of view on the same line.
Since first industry revolution we all have seen that econimic enviroment needs some time to move new tools to a productive way. The point is that now timeframe is quite short to absorbe all these tools because new ones come over quickly.
Moreover there is human mindset. Every time we have an inflection point in some areas (like economy but also scientific discoveries) we (human race i mean) need to have the right thoughts to support this changement.
However this post looks like a good contribution to this mind reasearch.

[rdomanski]

This is a fantastic and long-overdue discussion. What many of these internet-specific questions really get to is what should be the larger purpose of software. What human values should software embody, and how should developers then integrate those values into code?

http://thenerfherder.blogspot.com/2008/06/web-debate-on-saving-world.html

[pavel]

I very much like Rob's question "what should be the larger purpose of software." I hope that the ecosystemic nature of internet development will point to some answers. However, as much as ecology is an apt metaphor for digital community - in its dynamic development and organic integration of ideas in (often serendipitous) boundary moments/objects/events, there continues to be a tension between the ubiquity of software and the reality of experience, a tension which is ignored by many - how do we engage the palpable existence of the world we are trying to "save" without knowing it?

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It's amazing

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