Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

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Networking And Knowing: What Digital Entrepreneurs Do.

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Many of us retain a linear and sequential image of the entrepreneurial process. A hero entrepreneur looks for market gaps or identifies consumer dissatisfactions, designs a solution and takes it to market. The process is intimidating: it requires singular inspiration, breakthrough thinking, grit, money and luck, and takes a long time.

In fact, entrepreneurship is not about solutions designed by a few, it is about interactions between people, the more the better. Innovating is not a process, it is a set of collaborative practices taking place on interconnected networks.

The First Collaborative Car.

Recently, thousands of individuals around the world came together to design a new car from scratch. They did so through a project activated by Fiat called “Fiat Mio – the first collaborative car”[1]. It was a deliberate attempt to overturn the traditional development process by interconnecting with as broad a network of people as possible to gather and shape innovation ideas. Thousands of ideas from over 100 countries were gathered, and integrated into a new car launch. Moreover, all the ideas were placed in Creative Commons, so that they remain available to all, a complete inversion of the traditional route of secrecy and patent protection.

Research conducted by Dr Cristina Mele and Dr. Tiziana Russo Spena (both of University of Naples Federico II, Department of Economics, Management and Institutions, Napoli, Italy) points to this and other examples of interconnectedness as the opening of a door to an emergent and entirely new and revolutionary concept of economic, social and cultural innovation. It’s something we all do together.

Food As Social Discourse.

Think of the food industry today. Actors in the food industry, including consumers but also including farmers and food activists and nutritionists and athletes and bloggers and TV and internet personalities, increasingly spur on a social and cultural process that develops new ideas, new standards, and new perceptions of quality, authenticity, legitimacy and value. Organic, gluten free, grass fed, and low fat foods were not a single person or company’s idea offered to the market. They emerged from the interaction of innumerable participants. Food is social discourse and social practice. Food innovation is an interconnected social effort, the application of different people’s competencies and interests through resource and knowledge integration.

This rolling innovation in the food industry, propelled by the new interconnections of multiple players with different roles sharing new knowledge and combining it in new ways with established expertise, illustrates what Dr. Mele calls “connections-in-action”. Entrepreneurship is the continuous co-construction and co-creation that results from the interconnections among a network of market actors, actions, contexts and resources. Innovation is the emergent outcome. Rather than a breakthrough action of one entrepreneur or one R&D lab or one company, innovation is “a shared knowing and doing”.

The Four Practices Of Digital Entrepreneurs.

Digital entrepreneurs are the agents who integrate the activities through which market innovation emerges. Pursuing specific actions, they enable four practices that shape innovation:

Engaging: connecting market actors who are seeking opportunity to co-create innovation. These actors could be designers, thinkers, engineers, inventors, teachers, or parents, or play in any one of a myriad of roles. They have talent, they have an interest in making things better, and they are open to collaborate and share and develop ideas and projects. Engagement is the practice of expanding the variety of actors and roles – the more the better – in any collaboration to capture new possibilities for novelty.

Exploring: the continuous dynamic of knowledge creation and recombination through shared interaction – knowing and learning together. This is where problem solving occurs, through interconnected creativity, knowledge and competency.

Exploiting: the combination and transformation of knowledge in new contexts, seeking ways to re-use and re-combine knowledge and technologies. Collaborators modify and extend their concepts into new opportunities, translating knowledge in new ways and developing commercial concepts.

Orchestrating: ensuring, out of all the possibilities, the best flow of actions and resource integration. Orchestrators frame the network of collaborators to promote the most effective linkages and connections, mobilizing individuals to increase their personal empowerment and confidence, while also fostering community level speed and alignment.

Networking And Knowing.

Viewed together, these practices can be grouped into Networking and Knowing. Networking means all the ways of connecting people and resources. The emerging technologies of spontaneous order make it possible to bust the silos that previously impeded individual opportunity (such as the barriers between healthcare providers and patients in a healthcare system). Knowing means the shift of knowledge from object to action – a knowing that is co-constructed through the interaction of individuals (such as patients, doctors, researchers, medical specialists, data gatherers, etc) so that new common understanding can emerge.

Inno-mediaries.

Digital entrepreneurs are shaping markets as they create the new ways of developing, diffusing and using knowledge, and new ways to generate and promote innovation. Dr. Mele calls these digital innovators “inno-mediaries”. They encourage new innovators (consumers, communities, and experts) to enter into the co-creation of innovation by enabling new practices through the use of diverse resources.

Each individual one of us represents a critical component. The more we work at being interconnected, the more we contribute. We all should seek to be more knowledgeable, and better equipped for the collaborative economy. We should be active, constantly interacting, always crossing and blurring organizational and institutional boundaries. Everyone can be an inno-mediary.

 

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF6pXmt2-WU

 

Now Is The Time For Us All To Chart Our Own Individual Course.

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On the Road To Individualism, we chart our own course. That is certainly the spirit of America. Our stories and traditions include the original pilgrims sailing from Leyden across a dangerous ocean to unknown lands; the founding fathers who crafted a local revolution against the dominant global military superpower of the time; and the settlers who poured westwards across a vast continent to establish new lives and find new opportunities.

We Are Steered Off Course By Authority.

But lately, the freedom to chart one’s own course has been increasingly narrowed. From the very beginning of our lives, we are directed to take paths dictated by authority. We attend state schools –often bussed there on yellow state school buses – and memorize what the state wants us to know, since we are unable to accept responsibility for our own learning. Some of us go on to state-shaped and state-subsidized colleges. Others take licenses and certifications dictated by state authorities and industry cartels. We accept jobs in hierarchical authoritarian corporations and climb the corporate ladder to complete our pre-planned career and accumulate the corporate pension. We comply with restrictions on our behavior in order to borrow money from a big bank or to pass through an airport or to drive an automobile. We take the drugs the FDA allows us to, and wear DOT-mandated helmets on our motorcycles.

Governments are trying to make charting one’s own course even harder. The Chinese government, for example, is developing the concept of “social credit”. Using advanced technologies including facial recognition, internet data analytics and artificial intelligence to feed an opaque rating system, the Chinese authorities can deem any individual to have high or low Social Credit. Low social credit can result in exclusion from “privileges” such as freedom of travel, or even in the ultimate loss of freedom in the form of detention and imprisonment.

Maybe our own government will not go that far. Yet, the more you think about it, the more you’ll realize the extent to which your course is not your own. And you might despair that your individual freedom is ebbing inexorably away.

Happily, there is hope.

Design Your Own Education.

Firstly, the time is rapidly approaching when we can design our own education. Education on demand via interactive, software-enabled online lessons and courses will transform both sides of the learning platform. New providers of knowledge will put content on the platform, and consumers of knowledge will have new choices and the benefit of unbiased peer reviews to guide their selection. We will be able to assemble and combine our own degrees, certifications, badges and qualifications, adjusting on the fly to the changing demands of the job marketplace.

Knowledge on demand will be our support throughout a lifetime of learning. We will be able to access what we need to know when we need to know it, whether in the form of a technical manual for a home device, turning us into repair experts, or a survey of legal precedents for the case we are working on. The qualification we earned years ago in some sanctified institution will no longer be relevant or needed.

Make Flexible Work Choices.

Thus armed and in charge of our own cognitive development, will be able to make flexible work choices based on our personal values and life stage. What is important to me? What is meaningful? Shall I experiment for a while with a new and unusual work activity? Shall I create a new work timetable, working when others don’t and enjoying recreation when others are working? Shall I embark on frequent job changes so as to accumulate a unique lived experience? Shall I take a project-based approach to employment, creating revenue streams from multiple clients? Or shall I try a start-up, knowing that I can always utilize whatever experience and learning it delivers?

You can take a variable life path instead of a fixed one. Instead of defining yourself as, say, a teacher, you can redefine yourself as an individual who is on a quest to solve humanity’s learning challenges. You are not an engineer, but someone who harnesses technology to solve problems and you’re constantly searching for new problems to solve.

Your Values Are What’s At Stake.

What’s at stake? Our parents used to tell us that we should demonstrate consistency because that is what authority values. But what’s at stake is not the blessing of authority. What’s at stake is the authentic, values-driven life. You are the stakeholder in your own future. You can take the winding path of creativity and achieve more fulfillment for yourself and do more good for society.

You can construct your own personal brand, establishing an iconic and influential presence with a peer group of your choice in a field of your choice. A definition of iconic that you might use is to be acknowledged for distinctive excellence. Distinctive is the same as individual, and excellence represents your performance in your chosen métier. Charting your own course is the path to distinctive excellence.

The Road To Individualism: Signposts.

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The Road To Serfdom is a trenchant warning of how a western nation built on principles of freedom can easily and swiftly descend into collectivism, socialism and totalitarianism. All it takes is the abandonment of principles. Our politicians and bureaucrats do that every day, cheered on by some segments of the commerce and culture complexes.

Brittany Hunter has made clear the continued – indeed heightened – relevance of F.A. Hayek’s book, written in 1944, by live-blogging each chapter on www.centerforindividualism.org. We’ll shortly offer an e-book of every one of Brittany’s posts, with added Preface and Conclusions sections, as a free download.

Today, we can take a different road. The new direction would constitute The Road To Individualism. We see the roadsigns and we are able to interpret them.

Increasingly, individuals are charting their own courses.

On the road to serfdom, authorities tell us what to do and where to go. In education, religion, culture and government (via its octopus reach into legislation and regulation, money and banking, business and commerce, the environment, agriculture, housing, transportation, energy, health, trade, and security), there are ever-present and ever more powerful institutions who claim authority to direct us in our everyday activities and our life direction.

Individuals can recognize the myth. There is no such thing as authority, at least not legitimate authority. And the institutions who claim authority have pointed us in the wrong directions. The entire structure and process of education is questionable. Religious institutions are losing their supporters because the promise of religion has failed. And the same is true of government – the level of trust is at rock bottom because government has actively abandoned its principle of “for the people, by the people”.

Each of us is free to make our own decisions, and we look less and less to institutions for guidance.

New tools are becoming available to augment individual capability.

The prospect of charting one’s own course may sound formidable, but there are plenty of new tools to help. These tools will become universally available in short order, because the tools are technological and the tech industry has mastered the vertical adoption curve, along which deep global penetration is achieved at a fantastically rapid rate.

Technologies Of Individualism.

Artificial Intelligence can be made to sound ominous. It’s better to think of A.I. as Augmentation for Individuals. Each of us will be granted connection and access to unlimited knowledge, classified by our field of expertise and our areas of need. The interface will be voice-based natural language – ask a question and receive an answer. One term for our own personal A.I. is cognitive assistant, our own little software robot. These robots have already emerged as Siri, Alexa, Bixby and OK Google. They’ll evolve and grow through machine learning (which means figuring out what is most useful to its human partner).

The augmented individual will enjoy greater capability and self-efficacy.

Global exchange platforms enable individuals to connect to anyone and any organization in the world, to sell and to buy, to trade knowledge, to assemble project teams and to enter into any kind of collaboration. The individual can be an enterprise of one, with global scale, a customized supply chain and personnel team, and all the business tools and metrics that corporate managers use. The individual will have more control and flexibility than any corporation ever dreamed of.

Cloud computing supports this scale by making access to effectively unlimited computing power available via the internet in the precise units the individual enterprise requires. The apps and services embedded in the cloud alongside the server capacity can activate any business model instantaneously and reliably.

Blockchain technology cuts out the intermediaries who make commerce slow and expensive. There will be banking without bankers, contracting without lawyers, settlement of asset exchanges without brokers, visual design without designers, and 3D printing without factories. All of these decentralized and distributed processes will run at high speed, low cost and complete efficiency. All of the cost of intermediaries – both financial costs and efficiency costs – can be eliminated, making the individual as effective as the corporation, and releasing untold resources back into the productive economy.

These are technologies of individualization. They all place more power in the hands of the individual for self-reliance and self-management. Here are some of the implications.

An open market for capabilities.

An individual entrepreneur, managing his or her own work life and revenue streams, can refine the offering of their unique skills by finding just the right client, project and assignment on platforms like Upwork. On the other side of the platform, hirers can engage better talent for their jobs. Everyone can be an entrepreneur. The culture of dependency on employers for jobs will change to an open system of matching the best individual talent to the right project.

Networked advancement.

In the emerging new world of Individualism, the formula for advancement is knowledge + networking. We each will be responsible for continuously adding to our unique store of individual knowledge, and we will need to network to the right collaborators, partners and project owners to apply our knowledge through sharing and working in teams. LinkedIn is building the economic graph that aims to assemble smart profiles of every individual, every project and every hiring company, and to enable its automatic matching to place the right individual in the right job on the right team throughout the global economy.

Run your self-scaling business on a mobile device.

Every day, many more businesses are being created to run entirely on mobile platforms. Alibaba provides all the infrastructure for these kinds of businesses, from web support to cloud storage, to supply chain assembly, to payments services and inventory management. Alibaba is not just a company, it’s an economy – an economy of independent entrepreneurs setting up their digital storefronts and trading all over the world on mobile devices.

Self-learning rather than education.

Our institutions tell us that education is a passage for the first quarter of our lives, and that we must attend school, learn, pass exams and then, armed with the institution’s certificate of intellectual fitness, pass into the world of work never to return to the halls of learning. Technology is changing that view. Learning is something we will administer for ourselves. We’ll learn continuously throughout our lives. We’ll learn on-demand, creating knowledge when and where we need it. Applications like Udemy will give us our learning consumption choices, and platforms like Google For Education will provide support for teachers and content originators.

Self-financing.

Traditionally, the access to financing for entrepreneurs has been a bottleneck. Institutions control the financing supply, and dictate the conditions and the price. Today, crowdfunding sites like Ourcrowd can match willing individual investors directly to eager innovators with bright ideas in an efficient market for investment funding. No need for intermediaries.

Peer-to-peer contracting and settlement – law without lawyers.

The evolution of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain will disintermediate the legal structures and make law a distributed system. When law is software, there will be less call for judges and legislation, and less need for the pretentious buildings that house them and the outdated robes they wear.

Permissionless innovation.

In his book, Adam Thierer defines permissionless innovation as entrepreneurs being free not to seek the blessing of public officials when experimenting with new technologies and business models, or before developing and deploying new devices and services. This freedom will become the standard for interconnected entrepreneurs and our political institutions and protected special interests will not be able to stand in the way of innovation.

Crypto-currency competing with monopoly fiat currency.

In the 1970’s, F.A. Hayek published a pamphlet under the title of Denationalization Of Money. He could not have anticipated blockchain, bitcoin, ether or litecoin. However, he did anticipate competing private currencies, and a distributed exchange system to let the market decide on which private issuer of currency would earn the market’s trust. We have known for a long time that it is the government monopoly on money, and it’s profligate creation of more money, as well as the illegal fractional reserve banking of its licensed subsidiaries that create all the boom and bust problems of state capitalism. It is now possible that Hayek’s vision for competing private currencies will emerge into the forefront of a new private entrepreneurial economic system.

As more and more of us follow the signposts on the Road To Individualism, we will find that the old institutions crumble and we will open up the possibility for new systems and better lives.

Photo by Diego Jimenez on Unsplash

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