In a production economy, value creation depends on land, labor and capital. In a knowledge economy, value creation depends mainly on the ideas and innovations to be found in people’s heads.
Those ideas cannot be forcibly extracted.
All one can do is mobilize collective intelligence and knowledge. If knowing how to produce and sell has become a basic necessity, it no longer constitutes a sufficiently differentiating factor in international competition. In the past, enterprises were industrial and commercial; in the future, they will increasingly have to be intelligent.
The intelligent enterprise stands on three pillars: collective intelligence, knowledge management and information and collaboration technologies and needs the vital energy of intellectual cooperation.
Managing collective intelligence implies a radical change that will naturally elicit a lot of resistance. But we’re talking about a social innovation. Once it is in place, once the resistance has subsided, no one will want to go back to the way it was! As always, the problem lies “not in developing new ideas but in escaping from the old ones.” Keynes.
“A few words about a French project named Open Source Energy.This project is intended to enable the design of open hardware solutions to capture the different kinds of energies available all around us (from the environment or from human activities). A first module to transform and to store electricity from renewable sources is being designed: the ENERCAN (opensourceenergy.wordpress.com/lenercan-v1). This first brick is the starting point of a large scale design process toward the creation of new solutions inspired by old or forgotten ones and improved by the use of high-tech devices. The project is not about large and costly devices but about simple, open and cheap modules that can be replicated to capture every stream of available and lost energies, even the smallest one.
Besides designing the modules, the team took part in several events related to design or DIY in order to promote the project and to share with others.
Local Motors shares its innovations and lets customers be part of the car-building process, while keeping it local.
Last year, I spoke at Shanghai's Radical Design Week about the transformational design of business. I talked about car manufacturing and how, with state of the art 3D fabrication tools, a networked participatory culture and rapid innovation, the car company Local Motors claims to build cars five times faster at one hundred times less the capital cost of conventional manufacturers.
Local Motors is perhaps one of the most comprehensive examples of a revolutionary approach to the design, engineering, manufacturing, sales and marketing of cars. But don't worry if you are not in the automotive industry, the Local Motors story is one about the firms of the future.
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Designing high performance organisations
Companies today can change their shape, capability and performance by rethinking and redesigning core processes. In the case of Local Motors, its factories (the Local Motors micro-factory was rated by Jalopnik as one of the world's top 10 most impressive car factories), R&D, sales, marketing and production represents a design system that is an industrial ecology, rather than a series of boxes and silos. Moreover it is much less costly to set up, run and maintain, which enables the company to invest its energies into high quality design and production.
An open networked innovation platform
Local Motors runs competitions to find innovations. For its first vehicle competition, 44,000 designs were submitted and 3,600 innovators shared their knowledge and insights. No one company can hire that many people and there was no cash prize. So, what inspired so many people to participate?
Through its open participatory platform called The Forge, Local Motors has collaborated in automotive innovation with DARPA, the US military research agency, co-designing and building a fully functional prototype of a combat support vehicle in three and a half months. Even large car manufacturers have turned to Local Motors, such as BMW, which is currently running an urban driving experience challenge.
So Local Motors becomes more than just a car manufacturing company – it's an automotive innovation platform and a true community. Local Motors attracts innovators because it is creating and releasing social and intellectual capital into a common pool. This open innovation platform is counter intuitive to many assumptions about how businesses are run, and how intellectual products are created and protected.
Peer production, modularity & voxels: The RepRap-based, Lego-built 3D printing-milling machine
This research project aims to shed light on the conditions of transferability of Commons-based peer production (CBPP) processes to physical manufacturing. We draw from the political economy of CBPP and its conjunction with digital, desktop manufacturing technologies, the concept of “voxels”, and the case of a hybrid RepRap-based, Lego-built three-dimensional printer-milling machine, to discuss the importance of modular design. We show that modularity, not only in terms of development process but also of hardware components, is necessary to make possible CBPP’s replication for tangible products, decreasing the need for coordination and enabling parallel developments to various directions.
Full title: “Shedding light on the transferability of Commons-based peer production to physical manufacturing: The case of a RepRap-based, Lego-built 3D printing-milling machine”. Vasilis Kostakis and Marios Papachristou. To be submitted.
A little-known plant with a truly bizarre name is now making headlines as a cancer killer, with the compound of the plant vanishing tumors in mice with pancreatic cancer.
Known as the ‘thunder god vine’ or lei gong teng, the Chinese plant is actually integrated into Chinese medicine and has been used for ages in remedying a number of conditions including rheumatoid arthritis.
According to the new research out of the University of Minnesota’s Masonic Cancer Center, the thunder god plant compound led to no signs of tumors after a 40 day period — even after discontinuing the treatment. Published in the journal Science Translational Medicine and funded by the National Institutes of Health, even the scientists working on the project were stunned by the anti-cancer properties of the compound. Known to contain something known as triptolide, which has been identified as a cancer fighter in previous research, it is thought to be the key component that may be responsible for the anti-tumor capabilities.
Study leader and vice chairman of research at the Cancer Center explained to Bloomberg how he was blown away by the effects of the simple plant:
“This drug is just unbelievably potent in killing tumor cells,” he said. – See more.
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And just like with numerous other powerful substances like turmeric and ginger, mainstream science is still slowly confirming what many traditional practitioners have known for their entire lives. This is, of course, due to the fact that there is simply no money for major corporations in researching the healing powers of natural herbs and compounds such as the compound found in the thunder god vine. Turmeric and ginger, for example, have been found to be amazing anti-cancer substances that are virtually free compared to expensive and dangerous cancer drugs.
Nevertheless, the Big Pharma sponsored corporate scientists have managed to ignore these spices as much as possible. In fact, they have even been caught time and time again faking thousands of studies to fraudulently demonstrate the supposed value of pharmaceutical drugs pushed by major pharma juggernauts — many of which are later forced to pay millions in fines which only slightly stack up against their billions in profits.
Profits that are threatened by the many real studies that were performed by scientists examining the rejeuvenating power of cheap ingredients like turmeric, which has been found by peer-reviewed research available on PubMed to positively influence over 590 conditions.
Please read, view, and feel free to edit, comment, add to the list of stream recommended readings and viewings (at the end of this page), or contact the stream coordinator (Ludwig Schuster) as appropriate.
Money, markets, and value are some of the core-categories of today's capitalist societies. They come with specific meanings, forms and interpretations which are reflected in and at the same time give shape to socio-economic and cultural contexts.
This stream shall deal with the question what happens if these specific forms are (deliberately) changed. Do we need money in an economy of the Commons? If yes, how would that money need to be designed and who should control it? If no, how could a demonitised society look like? And perhaps most importantly, how can the phase of transition be envisioned? In this stream light shall be shed on the different standpoints and the reasonings behind them in order to reach a more clear-cut view and to find some common route in this extremely wide and controversial, yet highly important field.
I published What 2013 Has In Store 166 days ago and summed up my discoveries in Professionalism & Propaganda a week ago. This 1,800+ word piece with descriptive links to over thirty posts covers everything from my network of now over 3,000 Facebook Anonymous supporters through the CIA’s application of mindfulness to the analysis process, a direction taken in response to network threats.
During that time I completed a social network analysis class offered by Coursera and I curated nineteen related documents in my SNA Class collection. Humans exhibit a variety of interconnected ways of making decisions, information itself has a network of precursors and successors, and the flow of information through human networks can often be modeled as a spreading contagion.
There are a variety of problems that professional analysts face which have been studied in-depth by the Central Intelligence Agency‘s internal think tank, the Center for the Study of Intelligence. A distributed, grassroots network shares some characteristics with a professional cadre of analysts, but organizing, motivating, and assessing their progress is dramatically different from that of a hierarchical organization.
Here is an overview of the universe for the next stage in my inquiries. This Maltego graph displays five major components. The large group with the most diverse colors is representative of my place in the scheme of things – people who engage me in a bi-drectional fashion and organizations to which I subscribe. The cluster of people(lavender) and Twitter accounts(green) at the lower left represents e-International Relations, which is open and academic in nature. The similar looking cluster at the upper right are the Twitter users among the 156 analysts for Wikistrat. A larger graph of their complete network is seen in the next image. The cluster at the lower right is the LinkedIn-centric International Security Observers, an open, web based think tank.
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If I had to distill what I am trying to get at here in one paragraph, it would be this:
Groups of analysts need a shared context that can store and display information in chronological order, recognizing entities in the field ranging from states to naval vessels to individuals. The system needs to be able to store documents, images, URLs, and other internet accessible content. The system need not perform link analysis, but it must be amenable to doing so with its content using a tool like Maltego or Gephi, and then making the analysis available as an integral part of the overall offering.
