You can check my profile here, most of things I write are featured on the publication Stories of Platform Design, the publication related to Platform Design Toolkit development.

Maybe at some point I’ll get back to write something here, in the meantime, see you there!

The new 2.0 Final Release of the Platform Design Toolkit also comes with:

• a step by step guideline for self adoption
• a renewed website
• a White Paper on the role of Platforms in the digital market that will be released on the 20th of October (join the thunderclap campaign here: http://bit.ly/PDT_TC

Read our full release on medium here:  http://bit.ly/PDT20_RELEASE.

Download the Platform Design Toolkit 2.0 Final from here: http://platformdesigntoolkit.com/toolkit/#download

A few weeks ago, following a great workshop we had in Ruralhub, we added a new canvas to the pack: the Experience Learning Canvas.

You can access a detailed post explaining how to interpret and use the Experience Learning canvas on our Medium Channel and we also continued to explore the example of Airbnb (see below), and you can of course access the Google Drawing document to add your comments and download the canvas from the website.

Follow Us on Platform Design Toolkit own website: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com.

In this process, modern capitalism is encompassing the whole of the self in a natural evolution that was predicted by Karl Marx already in his grundrisse: it’s just the evolution towards cognitive capitalism and it’s just starting.

The big question to me is: will this post-industrial capitalism evolve into… post-capitalism?

I’ve been able to dig more into the topic in this article on Medium (I’m playing out with Medium for shorter reads, I’ll keep posting on meedabyte for longer reads).

Later on, I also had the chance to complement those early reflections on cognitive capitalism with a presentation, while preparing a talk I gave at a banking and insurance event earlier on this week, that helped me elaborate on the act of design in this age.

I really think that things such as the Bitcoin-Blockchain ecosystem (or the Ethereum one) are, in a way, new landmarks of design: they represent a new way of approaching design as inspired by the potential of emergence, mobilisation.

We learnt how to play with incentive design thanks to the first generation of platforms – that of the AirBnbs and Ubers – but the disruptors that are coming to “disrupt the disruptors” will work differently and will be able to generate even stronger network effects. These disruptors will be born from small things that can set big things in motion, in the same way as the Bitcoin-Blockchain ecosystem was born out of a protocol written on an open scientific paper; the seed that will likely transform the whole financial industry and more.

With smart contracts and smart locks coming into the game, reality really becomes programmable, and the potential for “systemic design” grows even further: our possibility to leverage on reality itself grows almost indefinitely.

The next institution might be a code snippet.

“Design has evolved from product to experience to service and system”

From: “Brand-building in on-demand economy”, Ana Andjelic.

In this post you’ll find the draft release of the new version of the Platform Design Toolkit plus an introduction gathering fundamental insights, links and references on Platforms and Ecosystems. If you are familiar with the topic you may just want to jump to the Platform Design Toolkit 2.0 Draft release: in this case, just use the following links to the key sections of this update. Please remember that the PDT 2.0 is looking for your comments.

• Why are Platforms so important today (and so is Platform Design)
• Modeling Platforms with the Platform Design Toolkit
• Go directly to see the content of the Platform Design Toolkit 2.0 (draft) explained or download everything from here http://bit.ly/PDT20DraftDowload

Tweet this to your followers: Discover Draft Release of #PlatformDesignToolkit 2.0 by @meedabyte bit.ly/PDT20DRAFT definitive tool to design Platforms & Ecosystems

UPDATE: Please note we also added further reflections and an additional Canvas here.

A premise: the story of Platform Design Toolkit from 2013 to today

The first time I started thinking about developing a Toolkit to help platform designer it was in 2013: I was frustrated with using the Business Model Canvas, a tool that – in my opinion – was designed and optimized for an old way of doing businesses: a linear way, that of the industrial mode of production.

The BM Canvas indeed implied a “linear”  perspective where the business owner creates the value proposition and provides this it to the market, targeting one or many customer segments‘s appreciation. Already that time, a growing understanding – even in 2013 – was pointing out to how successful companies increasingly started to operate as hubs, developing the ability to “organize” skills, resources and inventories and, by doing so, redesign entire markets from scratch, with impressive results.

The insights we started having in 2013 have been strongly confirmed by many studies – for example Deloitte and OpenMatters “Value Shift” research or Pentagrowth report – and, more importantly, by strong and clear signals coming from a market evidence: the success of those that we now call “networked businesses” or, more frequently, “platforms”, somehow exchanging the tool for the firm or entity that creates it.

After the Platform Design Canvas was presented at Barcelona Design Week in 2013, I had the chance to collect great feedback in a relatively short period and – combined with further reflections on the model – I had the chance to release a sudden minimal but important update in the same year. That updated version (the 0.2) main improvement – beyond slightly reorganizing the Platform Design Canvas was the introduction of Motivation Matrix, a tool – inspired by some existing Service Design experience – that helps to look into the motivations existing inside your system of entities that you wish to make collaborate thanks to and through the platform.

After almost two years of personal use of the kit (in private and public sector, startup and corporate contexts, strategic consulting projects, presentation at conferences, public workshops)and, even more importantly, after two years of receiving independent PDT adopters feedback, I felt it was really time to take the framework back to a research phase for a while. Reading blogs, books and talking long with some of the most brilliant thought leaders in digital transformation and collaborative economy, I collected powerful insights and I put all this knowledge and effort back on the PDT to make it a more powerful and resilient tool with this new version.

The main changes you’ll find in this (2.0) version on the Platform Design Toolkit can be easily listed:

• a revision of the type and set of key ecosystem entities you need to model (now including Partners besides Platform Owners, Peers and external Stakeholders)
• a bigger set of canvases (now four instead of two)
• a broader integration of aspects that go beyond the value production, such as evaluating externalities, platform governance and platform innovation 
• the possibility to interwork more easily with the Pentagrowth Framework developed by Javi Creus at Ideas for Change

he whole idea behind this 2.0 update is to share with you a tool that helps  you design far reaching platforms and more resilient ones – and also to help you rethink some of the key functionings of platforms by understanding the overarching model and being able to envision how the Platform model can be innovated and redefined.

Why are Platforms so important today?

But let’s take a short step back: why is Platform Design such a key skill at today?

Creating a so-called platform to access and leverage the potential of an ecosystem is increasingly recognized as the most powerful way to achieve market success: leveraging on ecosystems through platforms simply shown the ability to reach objectives that go beyond what could be possibly achieved by a traditional strategy operating in a controlled, internal, company owned environment.

As already pointed out, a few key research studies measured the superior nature of what we call “networked businesses”.  The already introduced Value Shift study from Deloitte and OpenMatters analyzed the evolution of business models in history and characterized them as follows: 

Four business models have been used in history (according to the study)

1. Asset Builders: build, develop, and lease physical assets
2. Service Providers: provide services to customers in form of billable hours
3. Technology Creators: develop and sell intellectual property
4. Network Orchestrators: create a network of entities in which the participants interact and build a shared value creation process

The study also pointed out that the business models of Network Orchestrators achieved notably better results than others and looked like an ultimate “evolution”:

“Our analysis indicates that as of 2013, Network Orchestrators receive valuations two to four times higher, on average, than companies with the other business models. Further, trend data over the past decade indicates that this valuation gap is widening over time. We call this degree to which a business model drives the gap between revenues and valuation “the multiplier effect””

The importance of having a Shaping Strategy

According to John Hagel of Deloitte Center for the Edge the most advanced and ambitious firms can now leverage on a new, “exciting potential”. This potential relies on the ability to completely transform how a marketplace operates and capture an incredible amount of value by doing so.

“Today, there are a growing number of opportunities to restructure entire markets and industries by designing new platforms and offering powerful incentives to motivate third parties to participate on them. These are very effective because they mobilize investment by a broad range of other participants rather than requiring the shaper to put all its own money on the table.”

As Hagel explains very well in this passage and in the related post, the nature of continuous transformation in technology and markets, brings up enormous opportunities for “aware” firms and teams. Those firms can now identify fragmented (or even not yet properly existing) markets and design powerful incentive strategies – embodied by a combination of a digital platform and elements of incentive design – that can help them leverage the potential of complex ecosystems of interaction between third parties. These third parties can gain incredible advantages and value by joining the ecosystem and therefore let platform owners (shapers) benefit from extracting a fraction of it.

Ecosystems therefore enable the participation of large and small organizations (or individuals) in creating value at a scale beyond the possibilities of a single firm. In these ecosystems participants co-create and interact in a way which would be impossible to manage in a traditional top down (industrial) manner. As a result of this massive collaboration effort and value creation, participants (including so called customers) are bonded by a shared interest and purpose and they protect and contribute to the ecosystem as a “commons” that enables them.

Platforms ultimately help ecosystems reach new potential and create the conditions for the rise of a community of entities that are well motivated to defend them.

The changing nature of the Firm

The success of this new breed of businesses recreated interest about the debate on the nature of the firm. Even thought leader and web superstar Tim O’Reilly to organize a dedicated conference and – few months ago – published an highly debated oped that sparked – some serious discussion – called “Networks and the Nature of the Firm“ in which he praises the emergence of the networked model of business as an “evolution of franchise”:

“In many ways, [platforms like] Uber and Airbnb represent a 21st century update of the franchising model. In franchising, the parent company brands and markets the product, sets standards for producing it, and charges a licensing fee and receives a percentage of revenue from each of its franchisees. The difference is that technology radically lowers the barriers to being a franchisee. In many ways, you can call the modern trend ‘the franchise of one.'”

The shrinking of coordination-transaction costs (essentially due to several technology shifts that improved or communication systems) is often pointed out as THE enabler of the evolution of the firm into what we now call Platforms/Network. While this is essentially true, we need to understand that not all industries and not all contexts in the same industry are subject to the same level of falling coordination cost and that therefore a coexistence of decentralization and centralization trends is to be expected in the digital marketplace. In a must read commentary of Tim O’Reilly’s post, Albert Wenger pointed out that networks (basically the way he calls platform enabled ecosystems) are to thrive in contexts where a tradeoff between the need for coordination (convincing entities to work in a process oriented fashion) and the need for motivation (competing for who’s the best around) is needed:

“If a market, or strategy within a market, calls for extreme coordination, the firm model (ed: the industrial firm model) will outperform the network (ed: the platform model). For instance, to create the perfect consumer experience for a smartphone Apple has integrated vertically backwards all the way to making its own chips. Conversely if motivation is of the essence the market model will outperform a network.“

In the end then while sometimes networks can achieve an even almost completely decentralized model of functioning – like in the Bitcoin/Blockchain ecosystem – most of the times the firm (or brand) still play a decisive “platform” role in organizing part of the production and designing an architecture of exchanges, incentives and experiences that – by leveraging the collaboration of peers (citizens) and partners (generally small, agile, professionalized players) can strongly redesign or reinvent markets.

The Trends that enabled the explosion of Platforms

But what are the “drivers” of the rise of the network/platform model? The transition towards a networked model of production, has been driven by the collision of several micro-trends and – more in general – from the collision of two mega set of trends: a technology driven disruption on one hand and social changes (meaning at both societal and user level) on the other.

From a technology standpoint we can identify at least the following macro set of impactive trends (something that I  call “What is now Technically Possible”):

• the rise of pervasive computing and pervasive internet access through mobile
• utility like (Pay As You Go) consumption patterns for technological infrastructures (public clouds, public storage, bandwidth)
• Widespread availability of Free and Open Source Software
• Modular, open and cheap hardware and the evolution of manufacturing supply chains
• Proliferation of Data and falling cost of data storage

Furthermore, from a social and user driven perspectives, the key drivers can be at least partially identified as follows (“What Users Value and Want now”):

• a rise of the social need for a collaborative, shared and efficient use of resources
• the growth of cities and, therefore, of urban and asset light lifestyles
• a rise of environmental and social awareness and a search for sustainable products and services
• growing importance of experiences over products as a result of omni-channel access
• the demand for cheap and accessible access instead of ownership

The collision of these two mega-drivers can help us identify what is the market currently asking to companies facing the digital marketplace today: techno enabled, conscious, users are pushing for products and service that are essentially:

• Designed in a human centric fashion with design mediating the increasing tech complexity to ease access (HUMAN)
• Strongly powered by data analytics to help identify what is relevant to the user (RELEVANT)
• Providing on-demand, localized and fast access to product & services (FAST)
• Providing an ultra personalized experience which can be customized by the user and thanks to her social sphere of influence (PERSONALIZED)

Additionally two more enablers collided with this set of new demands: the diminishing transaction cost due to mature communication tools and the rise of a producer attitude in the user, due to the democratization of access to digital tools of production. This further collision made the transition complete and generated the strong need for a real change in attitude in firms; this new breed of firm is one that:

• is radically more agile and able to experiment to discover how value can unlocked from existing or nonexistent markets
• is e able to create new markets by hacking growth and overcome chicken-egg problems by leveraging network effects that can help concentrate demand and supply to almost monopolistic level (in different niches, small and big)
• can work according to both: economies of scope and (not just) economies of scale

But at the end of the day, what is a platform exactly?

There’s no shared definition of what a Platform is so I’ll share with you here some tentative definition, from thought leaders, with the aim of exctracting some common sense that can be based on the reflections we just made. One particularly straightforward definition of platform from Sangeet Choudary of Platformed.info is:

“a business model that allows multiple sides (producers and consumers) to interact with each other by providing an infrastructure that connects them, on top of which they can build and exchange value, and governs the market that coalesces on top of it by determining which interactions are desirable and which ones are undesirable.“

Another particularly interesting definition – that relies on the “components” – is that made by John Hagel. According to him, a Platform is essentially made of:

• “a governance structure – including a set of protocols that determines who can participate, what roles they might play, how they might interact, and how disputes get resolved.!
• An additional set of protocols or standards – [that] is typically designed to facilitate connection, coordination, and collaboration.

And, always according to Hagel, such composed platforms are to be classified in four macro types:

• Aggregation Platforms – focused on simple transactions, connecting users to resources mostly in Hub and Spoke – middleman/gatekeeper – fashion (Eg: Apple, Airbnb)
• Social Platforms – focused on social interactions, connecting individuals to communities, tend to foster mesh relationship networking (Eg: Facebook)
• Mobilization Platforms – helping people to “act together”, fostering long term relationships (Eg: Linux, Li & Fung)
• Learning Platforms: facilitate learning, bring participants together to share insights, foster deep/trust based relationships, help participants realize more together and hone their capabilities (Eg: World of Warcraft)

In Hagel’s thinking, Learning platforms should be really considered the “final evolution” of platforms and elements of “learning” should be present in any platform type. According to Hagel, learning is key in a world of continuous disruption and performance pressure: in  such a world, participants continuously look for opportunities to hone their capabilities and improve their performance, an activity for which learning processes are essential.

In the already mentioned blog post, Tim O’Reilly offers his interpretation of what a “platform” business should actually do and therefore can help us somehow to understand what a platform is supposed to be, by means of its objectives.  According to O’Reilly a Platform should:

• Lower transaction cost to drive evolution in markets: platforms designers should focus on lowering barriers to entry for suppliers and customers
• Look for fragmented markets as an opportunity to seek for efficiencies (eg: taxi industry was highly fragmented locally).
• Pass on to the customer the savings introduced by efficiencies (lowering barriers to use of the service)
• Innovate pricing thanks to marketplace mechanism and data
• build mechanisms that support suppliers of all size
• invest in creating mechanism that bring the best to the top such as e reputation, search, etc…
• invest in mechanisms for empowerment, augmenting workers potential

Modeling Platforms with the Platform Design Toolkit

After having introduced the complexity behind the theory of platforms we’re now going into a consciously reductionist model that has been designed to help us understand and shape the complex interactions that happen in such a system. As I always say: it’s not important how perfect the Platform Design Toolkit model is, the important thing is wrapping your head around the motivations, interactions and possibilities that an ecosystem opens and try your way to shape them to create your impact opportunity.

What are the key entities/players/roles in a ecosystem-platform?

Around the functional role of the platform as-a-tool used by firms to access ecosystems, we can now identify four key entity types:

1. The Platform Owners

This category refers to the “owners” of the Platform: ultimately this set of players owns the vision behind the realization of the market, and is ultimately responsible to ensure that the platform exists in production.

Typically: Startups/Scale-ups …then corporate firms, shaping firms; nothing prevents this to be a non-profit organization, a foundation or a cooperative. In, still rare, cases peers can also be somehow owners of the platform – such as in the Bitcoin Blockchain ecosystem, where peers collaboratively, effectively own the infrastructure that makes the platform.

Examples: Airbnb, Apple (re the Apple app store ecosystem), Google (re the Android ecosystem for example), the Bitcoin miners network, Tripadvisor, WordPress (the firm), etc…

2. Stakeholders

Are the entities that have a specific interest in platform success or failure, in controlling platform externalities and outcomes, in regulating it or in exercising rights in the platform governance.

Typically: public actors or bodies dealing with regulation and control of platforms on a local basis, representatives of communities of peers and partners involved in the value creation, pre-existing institutions.

Examples: A municipality affected by the gentrification effects of short time rentals, the government, a holding group, a pre-existing incumbent, a pre-existing network or association of professionals interested in joining the platform.

3. Peers (Peer Segments)

Peers can be usually re-segmented in two major group of entities:

– Consuming Peer (CP, users): these are entities – most of the times individuals but can also be small/medium business and single representatives or teams in bigger organizations – interested in consuming, utilizing, accessing the value that the is created through and on the platform. Eventually they may evolve into producing peers, when they realize that beyond fulfilling a need they can seek evolution opportunities.

– Producing Peers (PP, citizen producers, prosumers, providers….): these are entities – most of the times individuals – interested in providing value on the supply side of the ecosystem/marketplace, usually seeking for opportunities to improve their professionality and honing their capabilities towards a better performance

Examples: The Airbnb hosts (PP), the Airbnb travelers (CP), WordPress bloggers (CP), Salesforce customers (CP), AngelList Angels (CP), AngelList Startups (PP), Houzz users (CP)

4. Partners

Partners are essentially professional entities – individuals and small/medium enterprises, most of the times – that seek to create additional professional value and to collaborate with platform owners at a stronger stage of relationship. Typically, partners are professional value creators that tend to specialize in a niche or advanced/premium product/service and become better and better within time. Partners sometimes also facilitate, cater, enhance the value production by acting as broker, facilitators, connectors.

Examples: Airbnb Superhosts, WordPress theme developers, Apple or Android developers, Salesforce Forge developers, AngelList syndication SuperAngels, WordPress Cloud service providers, Houzz professionals

Other Key concepts in Platform Design

Apart from the set of entities that participate to the platform enabled value creation process, to fully understand the complexity of a platform system we need to introduce a few more core concepts:

Infrastructure and core components

Infrastructure and core components are controlled and owned by the platform owners and governed according to the platform governance. Typically we talk about digital and physical assets, tangible components, that ensure the platform works and is usable by the ecosystem: these components need effort and energy to be run smoothly and in coordination. The activity of running the infrastructure and core components is one of the three Key Platform Value Production activities (see below).

Examples of infrastructure and core components can be a digital web based platform (eg: the wordpress.org website, Airbnb website, the Apple SDK, etc…), a mobile application (eg: the Uber app), a piece of standardized hardware (eg: the production or Arduino boards).

External components (Bricks/APIS)

External components can be used to build and reinforce the value propositions of any given platform. Most of the times these components are available in PAYG (Pay As You Go) mode (or in general as a utility) and are easily integrated with the platform workflow. A key example is the Uber API that has been easily integrated in many other platforms such as Tripadvisor but also meteorological data, booking APIs, traffic information APIs, location APIs, payment APIs, etc…

The platform itself can offer utility like APIs and bricks to other players (see below).

Channels (as evolution of Contexts)

Every relationships is born in a context and transactions happen better thanks to controlled and designed contexts that evolve into what we call channels. A context is defined more broadly than a channel and the latter can be often considered an evolution of the first. A refined and optimized channel should be available to make transactions easier. When complex transactions are broken into several sub-transactions a channel must exist for every phase to happen smoothly.

Example of contexts and channels include: the airbnb storefront and booking feature (for the booking sub-transaction), the recommendation engine and recommendation flow that happens in most of the multi-sided marketplaces, the Arduino forums (for knowledge and kudos exchange transactions)…

Key Platform Value Generation Activities

In a platform enabled ecosystem, three key activity layers that generate most of the value:

1. Maintaining & Producing the Infrastructure

Running the infrastructure the platform ultimately relies on to work is clearly one of the key activities since it enables the value creation process to happen entirely. The platform is usually run by the owners but novel approaches see also peers (or partners) being involved in this core activities. As an example, in Bitcoin Blockchain ecosystem (and the likes) the platform is essentially run in a distributed way across Peers (or Partners, depending on how we consider miners).

2. Core Value Proposition

The core value proposition is the primary value that the platform seeks to create for its core target (indeed, the target of the Core Value Proposition). Most of the times, in platforms and ecosystem that include Peer Consumers this is the peer segment ultimately being the target of the core value proposition. In many occasions a – even if the ecosystem includes peer consumers –  ultimately the Core Value Proposition may be directed to Partners serving the peer consumer base.

Examples: have a great local travel experience (Airbnb, peer consumer is the target), give visibility to the best restaurants, hotels and attractions (Tripadvisor, partner is the target), help bloggers to create great blogs (WordPress, peer producer is the target), expand smartphone use cases through specific applications (Apple, Android, peer consumer is the target), etc…

3. Ancillary Value Proposition

The ancillary value proposition is a secondary value that the platform seeks to enable. This is usually targeted to the same target segment of the Core Value proposition but can also be targeted to a different one. For example Airbnb is now experimenting with a “for business” offering that is targeted to a slightly different peer segment (travel offices for companies/business travelers); in the same way, the ancillary value proposition of the WordPress ecosystem and platform is to provide professional designers and developers tools to create functional, customizable and secure web solutions.

Key Steering activities

Every platform needs to evolve and be governed therefore is subjected to two key “steering” activities that shape its evolution.

1.Design and Evolution of the Platform

This activity is key to enable a platform that is able to evolve and adapt to changing conditions and to cope with changing demands in the ecosystem . Example of such activities is the evolution of a platform design (eg: improving software code base), improving security of data, designing policies and strategies for reputation management, designing the overall user-journey, etc…

This activity is typically carried on in line with the founders inspiring vision and the capability to design experiences through the platform has been key in ensuring platform success.

2.Governance of the platform

Governance of the platform relates with complex decision affecting the internal and external of ecosystem scope and entity. Examples of such activity relates with conflict resolution with stakeholder, key decisions in ownership, value distribution, policing, etc…

The core concept of transaction and value related to the “Platform”

As platforms are ways to organize interactions and ultimately transactions among an ecosystem, how should we ultimately define a transaction? Our proposed definition of a transaction is as a sub-action (part of a more complex “experience”) during which value – in different forms – is either created, provided, transferred or traded among two (most often) or more entities.

The transaction:

• Typically pertains to two parties
• Value is consumed (as in utilities) or exchanged (as in exchanges) or delivered (as in services) in whatever form: monetary value, reputation, experience, use value, curation, knowledge, information, energy, kudos, etc…
• Value can be tangibly identified and most of the time it can be measured – though not precisely (intangibles)

A rough definition of different transaction types that can happen on a platform is the following:

• Utilities: providing a third party (that can also be and often is another platform) with componentized information and access to the whole system of services and exchanges happening in the ecosystem, through a packetized and/or programmable interface (eg: APIs).
• Services: provided by the platform as “organized services” (by organising components, infrastructures, resources to provide a common service) directly to Partners and Peers in one-to-many pattern. These services can typically consist in two types:
  • Empowering and enabling services that are targeted to helping producing entities (peer producers and partners) improving their capabilities. Examples of empowering and enabling services can vary from: organizing an event to gather the whole ecosystem – eg: a developer conference –  to sending a professional photographer at new entrants airbnb’s hosts home to improve the appeal of new profiles and ease onboarding
  • more classical industrialized services can  be provided to peer consumers as complementary of the experiences provided by the ecosystem through the platform. Example of complementary services are the Airbnb for business proposition (where the company provides business travel agents and expense reporting) or the hosting solutions provided by WordPress.com to bloggers.
• Exchanges: these transactions happen between two entities in the ecosystem and consist of exchanging or transferring ownership of a currency or other stores of value (assets, money, token, credits), providing elements of intangible value (such as reputation, trust, kudos, likes, etc…), providing labour/work or enabling access to resources.

The Platform Design Toolkit 2.0 (draft)

Context where the PDT can be used

The platform design toolkit has been designed with the aim of facilitating the work of those involved in designing or (better) co-designing a Platform. To help you in doing this, the PDT can mainly be used in two different context.

• Modeling an existing platform: of course the PDT can be used to model and describe how an an existing platform works and therefore to gain significant insights on its functioning – and, for example, strong, winning points – or, perhaps, on it’s problems. This activity can be IMO carried on in substantially two circumstances: analyzing an existing platform you own – as a designer – and you want to fix, improve, modify or analyzing an existing platform you admire and you want to be inspired from by understanding more of how it works.
• Designing a platform from scratch, around an ecosystem (a problem, topic, company, geographical area, mission, etc…): another pretty common use of PDT is that of using the set of tools to envision (and preliminary design) a platform around an existing opportunity. In my previous experience I’ve seen the PDT being used to “build” a platform vision around an existing corporate business or startup or – in other occasions – around an existing emerging market of offers and needs, more in general, around an intuition that  a value proposition might answer to existing needs.

Despite the speculation about platforms may be wide – as also the references in the earlier part of this document show – platform design boils down to essentially:

• understanding what are the key entities in the ecosystem
• understanding how the core value is created and how ancillary value streams are potentially generated (who’s creating value and how this value is transferred to the ultimate value consumer)
• understanding what are the key transactions making up the more or less complex flow of work and ensure that context or (better) well formed channels exist for this transactions to happen flawlessly
• understanding what are the key components of the platform

and last but, probably, most importantly:

• understanding how the platform owners can support and empower the evolution of participants toward better performances, how to hone their capabilities to help them thrive and therefore produce better quality and the creation of a larger social capital and reputation.

All this with avoid ripping or pissing off the participant in the ecosystems.

What’s inside the Platform Design Toolkit 2.0 and how to use it

This new version of the PDT includes a review of the existing tools (the Platform Design Canvas and The Motivation Matrix, now Ecosystem’s Motivation Matrix) plus the formulation of three new complementary tools: the Ecosystem Canvas ap, the PPP aka Transaction Matrix and the Platform Schema.

Each of these tools has a specific value and mission and together they make a library of tools that you can decide how to use best: each of the canvases can be used alone or in combination with other tools (inside and outside PDT).

In the following lines you’ll find each of these tools presented in details about their use – each canvas also contains brief embedded instructions – in a potential order of use in the case of Modeling an existing platform. For the sake of clarity – we will provide an easy to understand example such as that of the well recognized and discussed global company that disrupted the hospitality industry: Airbnb.

Detailed guidelines about how to use the toolkit in Designing a platform from scratch, around an ecosystem will follow in the next days and weeks and on the dedicated website where we’re about to officially launch the final 2.0 version, after a period during which this draft will be Open For Comments (stay tuned and register on www.platformdesigntoolkit.com)

Please note, all the Link for Comments you find, will link you to a drive hosted file version that you can freely duplicate and fork. Please respect the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.

>Essential Canvases <

The three following canvases are essential, meaning that they will help you analyze the most important traits of your platform of choice.

The Ecosystem Canvas

Main use: map and identify stakeholders, peers & partners, external components.

Link for leaving public comments on Gdrive files: https://goo.gl/AKDJJK

Download all canvases from: http://bit.ly/PDT20DraftDowload

Description: This canvas can be used to map all actors in an ecosystem. Most of the times we populate the map by doing a brainstorming first (you can use brainstorming-metaplan to enumerate entities) and then putting the actors in the map.  If the actors in the upper right side are too many usually we prioritize the larger groups. Entities enumerated can be prioritized, by means distributing them across a four quadrant schema, according to the approach described in the Stakeholder Mapping that you can find on the Go Gamestorm portal: we usually map entities according to potential impact for platform success, and according to the level of attraction they have, or may have, in using the platform and end with a set of maximum five entities globally (peer consumers, peer producers, partners).

One thing I learnt is that prioritization of entities really deals with the initiative culture and is therefore an important choice that may need some consensus beyond collaborative prioritization.

The Airbnb case study example:

As anticipated, as an example platform we use Airbnb: in the case of the Airbnb ecosystem we can then map four entities beyond Airbnb owners: guests, hosts, superhosts and companies (for business travel). Of course we mapped City Councils as stakeholders (the discussion about Airbnb impact on local gov. stakeholders is years long).

Note that the main difference when modeling an existing platform instead of designing a platform from scratch lies in the freedom to chose entities: of course when is you designing a platform – at the very start – you’ll identify entity segments, prioritize them and you’ll later on attach “roles” on them. To explain it very briefly: if you were designing airbnb you may have identified “home/hospitality providers” and then segmented it in hosts and superhosts.

The Ecosystem’s Motivation Matrix

Main use: to understand better the motivations that all entities have to participate to the ecosystem value creation plus what they can give to each other.

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Description: the Ecosystem’s Motivation matrix is used to dig deep into the motivation that push entities in the ecosystem to participate. The darker area on the diagonal of the matrix is used to take note of the main advantages in participating in the the ecosystem through the platform (namely, needs they can meet, opportunities they can find and such positive outcomes). On the other cells, you need to annotate what the entity on the axis on the left can “give to” the entity on the upper axis. In the case of the cell indicated by the arrow of the explanatory box in the canvas, you’ll need to annotate what Entity on the 5th lane “gives to” the entity on the fourth column (and lane).  A clear example of a traditional, service design related, motivation matrix can be seen here at Service Design Tools.

The Airbnb case study example:

As you can see from the picture below we took the assumption that – on Airbnb’s platform – Superhost are involved in producing the for business proposition dedicated to companies. Companies themselves are considered as “peers” despite they’re no “human” entities, they can be considered as single entities accessing the system as consumers (eg: representatives of travel offices).

The Platform Design Canvas

Main use: to rapidly map the overall platform’s dynamics, important resources and enabling and empowering potential – will help to understand if the platform is doing its job of sustaining the ecosystem in value production.

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Description: the new Platform Design Canvas is much different from the older version. The small letter in the boxes give the user a potential priority in doing the canvas mapping but they should be considered just as “indications”.

Typically you’ll arrive to the canvas after having done the Ecosystem mapping and therefore you should have a clear idea of what are the entities in the most external parts of the canvas: Platform owners, Stakeholders, Partners, Peer producers and Peer consumers. Please note that it’s always important to focus on the “roles” these segments will play on the platform: as an example, on Airbnb platform we should keep track of Hosts as peer producers and Travelers as peer consumers while both might be considered part of the same “citizens” segment. After having identified the main entities involved it will be useful to focus on the Core Value Proposition of the platform and to point out who’s the target of the CVP (we may call it the core target).

The Airbnb case study example:

Despite being fairly simple – simplicity is probably one of the key drivers of Airbnb success – The Platform Design Canvas for Airbnb shows a few key insights: first and foremost the Core and Ancillary value proposition complement each other nicely in terms of segments and are targeting both consuming and producing peers (also to ensure demand and supply grow both). Furthermore is very nice and clear to see that there’s a natural “evolutionary” path for ecosystem participants that allows and helps them evolving from guests (peer consumers) to hosts (peer producer) and then superhosts (partners) and that the platform always have the right support service for this evolution to happen. Is indeed very interesting to see how Airbnb makes it very easy for people to get onboard (sending a photographer for free to take nice picture of your listing) and then it focuses on perks and coaching to bring hosts to superhost level (basically getting to achieve a standardized level of performance) to finally bring all its best hosts to an open gathering – the Airbnb open conference happening in Paris – to share insight and build more community belonging.

UPDATE: This evolutionary path (consumer-producer-partner) is key for platforms and have been the subject of a deeper analysis – where we also presented an additional canvas – you can find here. As we said already, the learning platforms is the ultimate incarnation of the platform success and therefore helping its participants to become better hosts by learning more about experiences is a key success point for Airbnb.

>Advanced Canvases <

The following canvases are not essential but advanced, meaning that they will help you analyze the deepest traits of your platform of choice, ranging from detailed analysis of all transactions up to the governance and evolution processes.

The Transaction Matrix (PPP)

Main use: to understand better and dig up the the details of the transactions happening in the ecosystem.

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Description: The transaction matrix is useful to extend the preliminary analysis on transactions (utilities. exchanges, services) that are identified in the Platform Design Canvas. The use of the transaction matrix is not mandatory but it is of great help in identifying the key elements of each transaction that happens in the ecosystem. The matrix can be easily read by seeing all the value production entities in the ecosystem (the platform, the partner and the peer producer) and all the entities capable of receiving value in the left column (other platforms, partners and peers of all type): the arrow indicates that you need to red the matrix by considering what kind of transaction might happen between a value production entity and a value receiving entity. The first quadrant on the upper left corner is therefore dedicated to list all the transactions that may happen between platforms: that typically happens through programmable interfaces (eg: APIs) – eg: Tripadvisor using Uber APIs.

The quadrants holding the light blue sign contains the transactions happening between the platform and the entities in the ecosystem: this “services” can be enabling (partners) and empowering (peer producers) but might also be a set of “consumer” oriented services like classical ancillary services that may help complement the Core Value Proposition (and therefore making up the Ancillary one) towards consuming entities or users.

Finally the quadrants holding the green sign are related to “exchanges” that happen in a true peer to peer fashion – outside the industrialized control of the firm and by the participation of the peers: the essence of networked model of production and the soul of the platform in the majority of the cases. These exchanges typically make up the core value proposition of the platform. Obviously you can have many exchanges in a platform also between producing entities that may collaborate beyond competition – but it’s more typical to see producer-to-consumer exchanges (Partner or Peer Producer to Peer Consumer).

More in details the notation proposed for tracking the transaction details is:

• T – the transaction name
• V – the value exchanged
• C – the channel (or context) through which the transaction happens

The Airbnb case study example:

The PPP Transaction Matrix for Airbnb helps us understand more of the real “transaction” happening in the system. In particular the first insight we can spot is that all transactions involving exchanging money (booking and paying) are monetized in real time – on both sides – by Airbnb while the whole set of “empowering and enabling” services (Platform to Peer Producers and Partners) are all given out for free (there’s no registration fee) and are complemented with a relatively strong offer of channels and contexts where you can learn how to become better hosts.

The last substantially important currency that is shared on the platform is reputation: critical to platforms success – as Tim O’Reilly says Platforms need to help the best emerge – reputation makes, together with money and knowledge on how to become a better host, the whole set of the value currencies exchanged and provided on the Airbnb platform.

The Platform Schema

Main use: to identify who’s to produce the “Core Value Proposition” and the other Value Generation Activities and how such activities impact on external stakeholders and to complement this by thinking how the different entities should be involved in platform steering activities.

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Description: the platform schema is the final and most holistic of the tools in the Platform Design Toolkit. The schema helps the platform designer or analyst to understand what is the entity group (or the groups given that more than one can be involved) that produces the Core Value Proposition and the other Value Generation Activities or, more in general, how this entity is involved in the value generation process. Also it gives you the hint of thinking how such activities impact by generating externalities on stakeholders. After having carried on the first part of the analysis the designer will be more apt to determine if, how and when the entities in the ecosystem should be involved or not in the two key steering activities such as the governance of the platform and the evolution of the design of the same.

The Airbnb case study example:

The application of the platform schema to the Airbnb case also brings some interesting reflections up for further thinking: in particular it’s clear from the schema how the platform mainly plays a facilitation and orchestration role in value generation activities while has a strong control on governance and experience design. Another interesting bit of information is related to understanding how impacted stakeholders (city councils) are being involved by Airbnb on the regulation and integration of the platform with local regulations and laws with its Occupancy Tax Collection and Remittance feature, active in some markets.

UPDATE: Please note we also added further reflections and an additional Canvas here.

Tweet this to your followers: Discover Draft Release of #PlatformDesignToolkit 2.0 by @meedabyte bit.ly/PDT20DRAFT definitive tool to design Platforms & Ecosystems.

An executive summary of this post is available as a presentation on SlideShare:

Thanks for reading this post, please remember that this work currently open for comments and you can click on each link below the canvases to access a GDrive instance that you can directly comment. If you feel like giving a short feedback through this 3 minute survey your support is really appreciated!

If you’re building a Platform, or you’re just interested in the official launch of Platform Design Toolkit 2.0 and the related offering of strategic advisory and co-creative workshops please register here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com

A Special Thanks for this Draft Release must go to: Javi Creus and Ideas for Change for the amazing work on Pentagrowth, OuiShare and Cocoon Projects (especially Stelio Verzera for the amazing feedback) for having adopted the PDT framework in various ways, Eugenio Battaglia for the support to the PDT 2.0 release, Jordi Llonch Esteve and the award winning Sharing Academy for the enthusiastic adoption and the valuable feedback plus all the other early adopters and especially to OSVehicle, RuralHub and ADEO Group among others. Thanks also to all the workshop participants that gave me such a great support in rethinking the model.

Sudden, mostly technologically driven, changes of perspective are frightening up all incumbents of our society:

“Technology – software in particular – has had a destabilizing effect on traditional business models. The proliferation of personal computing power has leveled the playing field in almost every industry. As products and the means to create them have become digitized […] production capability has grown more accessible and portable […] every single day it gets easier for someone else to compete with your product or service, and to do it better, faster, and cheaper. It used to be that the best day to start your business was yesterday. Now[..]tomorrow is almost always a more advantageous starting point”

To thrive in this new societal landscape, according to Dignan, companies must therefore adapt to this new “operating model”: firms must become perfectly collaborative machines, must develop adaptability capabilities and be dedicated to continuous experimentation. Reponsive Oraganizations must be able to understand technological change, mold it and use it to their advantage in facilitating value production at every level. According to an efficient resume offered by Dignan’s old but still good post thriving organizations of today:

“hack together products and services, test them, and improve them […] are obsessed with company culture and top tier talent, with an emphasis on employees that can imagine, build, and test their own ideas. They are maniacally focused on customers. They are hypersensitive to friction – in their daily operations and their user experience. They are open, connected, and build with and for their community of users and co-conspirators. They are comfortable with the unknown – business models and customer value are revealed over time. “

Dignan’s word strongly resonate with those of another privileged interpreter of digital transformation such as John Hagel III. Recently introducing the next Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna, Hagel talked about how the (techno driven) “performance pressure” of today poses a fundamental challenge to all of our society’s institutions: to choose between chasing the next strategy to achieve production efficiency or – on the other hand – look for increasing the possibilities available to us as human beings, being us employees, customers, peers or partners.

Technology is indistinguishable from humans

No coincidence that when Hagel speaks about digital platforms he see the evolution culminating in what he calls the “learning platform“: the boldest incarnation of the platform is that of a context where participants can learn and grow new opportunities: platforms that accelerate user performances and, at the same time, hone their capabilities and skills.

Despite all the recent fuss on the impact of digital platforms – and the need for transforming their existing model – we should eventually understand that these just one of the deepest and latest expression of our humanity. In a beautiful short essay entitled “Can we learn to be intelligent?” Esko Kilpi explains how – if you look to technology itself is a tool produced by mankind a bit like Marshall McLuhan said decades ago – you can understand that technology shapes humanity no less than humanity shapes technology itself: “We Shape Our ​​Tools and Our Tools Shape Us” McLuhan used to say, according to a quote of doubtful attribution. According to Kilpi:

“We should welcome the fact that people today are smarter in large measure because they have invented and use smarter tools. Making tools is what human-beings have always done. The interactions between tools and human minds are so complex that it is very hard to try to draw a line between humans and technology. Neither is it a zero-sum game where the human brain is losing to technological intelligence”

But if technology is to be considered indistinguishable from humans why shouldn’t we also apply this consideration to the organizational “technologies” that we adopted in the last seventy years? Corporations, bureaucracies and institutions that we use represent ourselves, ultimately… ARE ourselves.

Once upon a time, the Sharing Economy

I often reflect on these considerations when I happen to witness the age-old debate on sharing-economy-in-and-out AKA something “is not enough sharing” but only “platform capitalism”: with infinite attempts to define taxonomies to define what is different and what is equal.

But what, if we look further, are these digital platforms becoming? Few people are realizing that, in a key and recognizable trend, these platforms are just becoming new forms of organizations, increasingly competitive with the more traditional “industrial” mode of production going into frontal conflict with troops of old age incumbents.

Essentially due to the collision of ubiquitous connectivity tools such as smartphones or GPS trackers and the emergence of new languages and interaction modes – such as those coming with widespread adoption of social web and apps – today, platform companies can increasingly mobilize “networks” made of thousands, if not millions, of independent producers and collaborators – not just employees. Thanks to these enablers, the actions of (more or less) professionalized users and partners can be are coordinated on a shared technological platform: these actors share contexts, tools and storefronts and can easily provide users with a consistent experience increasingly comparable with that provided by a more traditionally “industrialized” company.

Unlike what happened until recently, nowadays the same organization, the “platform”,can achieve a relevant level of two key factors in economic activity: motivation and coordination. I would refer to Albert Wenger’s gorgeous Networks, Firms and Markets for a more complete understanding but I can try to explain as much as possible.

In markets motivation favors the emergence of the best ones and is essentially the engine of competition: successful digital platforms build powerful reputation engines that make the best ones stand out in a context that – as previously said – is common and shared by all the producers. Not surprisingly, in the much talked “What’s the Future of Work” series opening post, Tim O’Reilly – last among internet gurus to address this issue – precisely identifies the capability to “allow the best to emerge” as one of the key features of successful platforms.

On the other hand coordination – the core activity for which the modern industrial firm was born – that we could define as the essential capability to marketize a repeatable and ubiquitous outcome such as a service – is replaced in digital platforms by the ability of the platform designer to channel existing ecosystem’s motivations to eventually participate in creating a consistent experience, fully recognizable in the brand and in the role of platform itself (eg: the Airbnb travel experience). Essentially to help platforms designers in creating systems that can leverage existing motivations in ecosystems and facilitate value creation on platform, I first created the Platform Design Toolkit in 2013: as a new version is being released these days you may want to register here to stay tuned on the new draft release.

This shift from the industrial to the post-industial model of production first occurred in markets where the need for coordination is limited and the basic transaction model is quite simple – such as the accommodation or urban transport industry – but this same model is now landing on basically any market, be it big or small, niche or generalist.

From Airbnb and Uber to everything else

As explained well in awesome Rawn Shah “Moving From Mass Production Supply Chains To Market Networks“, the last frontier of platformization is the landing of this trend on more specific and professional markets – from home renovation to events organizing. These are markets traditionally made of established professionals (or wannabes) working closely on complex projects with “partners” and interacting with end users. According to Shah:

“The real gem is the ability to construct complex and context-specific business arrangements across multiple partners, not just scaling individual transactions repeatedly. […]

[…] collaboration happens around the multiple or complex services needed for a project, where you select partners based on visible reputation and trust, which can result in longer term relationships, referrals and increased satisfaction. Orchestration becomes the key challenge, and this is where the workflow comes into play.”

As J.Currier excellently defines them, “market networks” are birthing from the convergence between social networks (excellent tools for managing relationships) and marketplaces (famous for managing transactions optimally). In this sweet spot, thanks to the support of the digital platform, more complex business processes can take place in an optimized manner generating a huge amount of value due to the high value add context in which they happen: from organizing of an event to fund raising for a new startup, from designing and bringing to the market a new product to renovating your home. According to Currier:

“Over time, almost all independent professionals and their customers will be able to conduct their business through the market network of their industry.  The market network will have a tremendous positive impact on how millions of people work and live and how hundreds of millions of people buy better services. Over time, nearly all independent professionals and their clients will conduct business through the market network of their industry. We’re just seeing the beginning of it now.

Market networks will have a massive positive impact on how millions of people work and live, and how hundreds of millions of people buy better services.”

But what could be the long term impact of such a deep inversion between the bureaucratic world of the industrial age and the new world of “responsive”, platformed organizations? To quote Rawn Shah again, rethink how companies produce their services means also rethinking how “businesses can be structured, how people are employed, how relationships matter, and how to delight customer and deliver to their increasingly complex needs.”

In this experimentation frontier platforms threat their users as learners, as someone who needs help to improve her capabilities to meet the growing pressures of modernity (technology), someone who needs new tools to interface with the changing nature of work and help in finding harmony of such a work context with the increasingly important ecosystem of human relationships and lifestyle expectations.

The evolution of the firm and work in the era of digital platforms

So what happens to the firm – and ourselves – in this process? Despite the final result is not yet clear (and may never be), visionaries like Esko Kilpi can sometimes conjure up convincing images In a recent piece titled “The new kernel of on–demand work” Kilpi explains that this new kernel of on-demand work is in “allowing us to create a new understanding of work [itself]: contextual interaction based on collaborative creativity and human capital”. In this this new discovery process of the transforming nature of work “a firm, then, is not a bundle of assets belonging to owners, but a bundle of dynamic commitments between people: the organization becomes a process of ongoing organizing” – work becomes then what Kilpi calls…“value-adding relationships” brilliantly explaining the core importance of social and reputation capital in such a new context. The inadequacy of existing institutional forms – the firm, the cooperative, the non-profit organization – in this new context can be clearly spotted.

But are we talking about a silent revolution that – as per Paul Mason – is decreeing the “end of capitalism” or are we witnessing rather an evolution of the same? As excellently explained by a very comprehensive post on Agile Elephant blog – transaction costs are falling not only outside of the firms but also inside the same and indeed the unicorns, hyper winning platforms of the recent era, are in most cases firms themselves, just a new breed.

As E. Morozov recently said “any narrative about capitalism cannot not also be about “the Internet”; any narrative about “the Internet” cannot not be about capitalism.

Re-reading Friedrich Hayek’s work in the information age

In his June oped on the Guardian on the ”age of platforms” Morozov referred to Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and his self-adjusting, free market utopia where mechanisms of self-regulation – quite similar to those we see today on digital platforms – can beat centralized regulation in efficiency. As Morozov explains in the Hayekian utopia:

“your reputation would reflect what other market participants know about you. Thus, if you are a nasty customer or an ill-mannered driver, everybody else will soon discover this, and specific laws to police your behaviour are rendered unnecessary. The good news, according to Hayek, is that once our norms change – what was considered nasty 50 years ago might be perfectly acceptable today – our reputations would reflect these changes immediately. Laws, on the other hand, would take quite some time to be altered”

For as much libertarian and Thatcherite this may seem – Margaret Thatcher was indeed among the most ardent followers of Hayek thinking if it’s true that Thatcherism sprung from a renewed interest in the theories of the Austrian economist that got the Nobel in 1974 – Hayek’s theory goes more deeper. Hayek was perhaps the first to understand the complexity of the modern world and his frequent confrontation with Keynes, father of the simplified understanding of macro economy, are indeed clearly justified.

According to Morozov, the terrain of digital platforms’ regulation is really the last and most important stage of the clash between cognitive capitalism (represented by the giants of Silicon Valley) and social democracy:

“Silicon Valley is mounting an attack on the very philosophy behind social democracy – that market-bending rules and regulations can be set by governments and city councils. Silicon Valley believes otherwise: the only proper constraint on the excesses of the market is the market itself. Thus, it’s up to consumers to punish – through bad ratings, for example – bad drivers or unreliable hosts; governments should stay out. Does any of this add up to “post-capitalism”? Well, maybe – but only if we are prepared to acknowledge that capitalism, for the past century at least, has been made stable by the social democratic compromise, which is now being made obsolete. Inasmuch as “post-capitalism” emerges out of weakened social protections and industry regulations, we might as well be precise in our definitions: if Silicon Valley represents a shift to anything, it’s probably to “pre-capitalism”.

Hayek himself predicted that liquid market opportunities and peer exchanges could raise challenges for some, pushing them towards the dangerous possibility of succumbing to ubiquitous competition: in fact, he was among the first to support the idea of an unconditional basic income that would partially solve such a problem.

However, a fascinating reflection that we must do while re-reading Hayek today is related to the key distinction that he makes when speaking of the fundamental economic problem of society:

“The economic problem of society is not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources — if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality”

The emergence of tools such as the Blockchain – bringing algorithmic trust and transparency to the masses – or that of the pervasive Internet of things -interconnecting and making the world more interdependent – can perhaps enable this last revolutionary shift: the total pervasiveness of knowledge about what – at a given time – is needed to a particular actor in society.

Of course, in this perspective, our economic model – and so capitalism and organizations – would undergo a radical change and the Hayek’s visions perhaps would sound less like an ultra liberal utopia and more like a lens to understand the increasing complexity of our modern world.

—

Addendum: transformation and digital platforms will be central topics in the Rethink Remix events coming up in Milan and in Barcelona later in November. Book your tickets if you’re interested to join and meet.

Spanda Journal is a series of essays on the theory and practice of collective intelligence and transformative action, from a systemic dynamic perspective. How and where does systemic change manifest? How does it unfold?… more

If confronted with the current state of the global system that we call human civilization we cannot hide from the harsh truth: the system we have built – across ages and several Techno-Economic Paradigm Shifts^[1] – now looks in a particularly complex situation.

Most of the global industries (from retail to manufacturing, from food production to logistics) that empower the current dominant lifestyles – the western, urban, connected lifestyle that all earth citizens seemingly aspire to – are just sitting there waiting to be disrupted. While most of such industries show evident signs of social and environmental un-sustainability and long term fragility, some of the key economic players are rethinking themselves, embracing different models that, most of the times, relate to decentralization, collaboration, openness. These models are mimicking or getting inspiration from (and sometimes even are collaborating with) the realm of the digitally empowered communities and commons based, p2p revolution.

Such collaborations and mashups (and sometimes clashes) between the two worlds may well be providing impressively good and exponentially accelerating returns on innovation (which Nick Grossman eminently catches with his “Venture Capital vs Community Capital” concept that I will introduce later). There is however a growing concern in public discussions on digital social innovation over the prominent role – in the transition to a better, re-organized, resilient world – that privately owned, capital backed companies may have in generating radical innovations.

If we look back to the history of continuous development of new technologies (intended as the evolutionary process which almost all human activities are subject to) we notice that there has always been a dual impact. On one hand, technologies that historically made entirely new things possible indirectly produced large impacts on our global instabilities: after the industrial revolution, large footprint industries created new technologies in a void of serious political frameworks to regulate environmental and social externalities. On the other hand the most impressive of all human created technologies – the internet – is now giving us the very tools to understand, discuss and eventually transform all of our pre-existing industrial economic processes into a post-industrial era that looks intangible, automated, efficient and enabling for the citizens.

The intangibilization of the economy is finally pushing capitalism to face its transition into post-capitalism, and is doing so in exponentially faster cycles: as Nick Srnicek puts it “Deindustrialisation is a necessary stage to move beyond capitalism”^[2] and that’s what we are starting to see.

The Internet of Things may be the last large scale infrastructure mankind needs to build and it will likely be built in a decentralized fashion through the adoption of (intangible) protocols rather than big corporate investments. Ironically enough, in a world of intangible value and no need for capital – a world that is “awash in money”^[3]  – capitalism is evolving and a new breed of companies is arising to dominate and monopolize markets that it has created itself from scratch.

A new breed of companies enabling Platform Based Peer Production

A number of interesting studies released lately reinforced the idea that – in an era of widespread access to a growing set of means of production, from computers to fabrication machines – networked business models win. A recent study from OpenMatters and Deloitte^[4], based on the observation of 40 years of S&P500 companies, reported that four major business models have been used so far in the history of capitalism: more in details, these business models are those of Asset Builders (firms that “build, develop, and lease physical assets to make, market, distribute, and sell physical things”), Service Providers (“hire employees who provide services to customers or produce billable hours”), Technology Creators (“developing and selling intellectual property”) and finally, Network Orchestrators.

This new breed of companies wins on the market by creating networks of peers in which participants – being prosumers, small business or partners in general – interact and play a role in a shared and internetworked value creation process. With no surprises, this research confirmed that Network Orchestrators historically achieved better financial results: bigger market value, faster growth, higher profit margins.

By surfing on the strong reductions of transaction costs mostly made possible by the ubiquity of the Internet and by leveraging existing and eventually “connected” infrastructures, inventories and network of resources, these companies can create markets that didn’t exist before. They can grow these markets into millions of participants, if not billions – by making connections and generating interactions between value producers and consumers, often shortcutting traditional middlemen and gatekeepers. These “platforms” focus on creating customer driven value – by using advanced techniques to deploy, test and measure the new – and on generating user experiences that are not only just better, but often 10x if not 100x times better (faster, easier, more enjoyable, more accessible, etc.) than the – not always existing – alternatives.

These “platforms” effectively enable what could be called a “Platform Based Peer Production” (PBPP in the rest of the document) paradigm – in contrast to the well known concept of “Commons Based Peer Production” as defined by Yochai Benkler.

From the intangible corporation to the unvaluable corporation

According to a recent Ocean Tomo research^[5], which pretty much confirmed historical data, we are living in an era during which the market valuation of successful companies is defined for more than 80% by their intangible set of assets. In this respect, the champion of the first decade of the century was, with no doubts, Apple. Apple succeeded in making the most of its design capabilities and brand narrative of “thinking differently” by managing a relatively small industrial footprint, kept light mostly by systematically leveraging on existing eastern OEMs^[6] and actually building its overall branded “platform” (mostly made of devices and developer ecosystems) on top of multiple, stratified, already available infrastructural layers such as the world wide web, global logistic chains and the productive capacity and shared knowledge of Chinese and Korean consumer electronics factories.

In an interesting recap of his already mentioned speech at the recent OuiShare Fest 15 in Paris, dubbed “Venture Capital vs Community Capital”, USV’s^[7] Nick Grossman laid out an interesting consideration on how subsequent technological paradigm shifts enable the generation of new innovation waves that break and build on existing ones. Grossman’s blog post brings several interesting points to the table but, in particular, he describes how the rise of monopolistic, or quasi monopolistic, platforms first become enablers of new layers of innovation and then get disrupted themselves within time. According to the convincing explanation from Grossman, this happens, most of the time, thanks to an emergent role of open, shared standards or distributed architectures enabling higher value services. Very frequently these open disruptors are what I call “interfaces”, knowledge or design commons (think about Linux or the Http protocol).

Cycles of Bundling and Unbundling [8]

As a possible example we can think of Google becoming what it is now, on top of a precedent wave of innovation generated by AOL and Microsoft (in democratizing personal computer industry and internet access): the emergence of the World Wide Web (as set of standardized protocols) from this contest gave us the Googles and Facebooks of today.

“So there’s the pattern: tech companies build dominant market positions, then open technologies emerge which erode the tech companies’ lock on power (this is sometimes an organized rebellion against this corporate power, and is sometimes more of a happy accident). These open technologies then in turn become the platform upon which the next generation of venture-backed companies is built.  And so on and so on; rinse and repeat.”^[9]

In a way, this is what is happening now again: peer to peer marketplaces and platforms (the PBPP) are poking holes in the dominance of the GAFA (standing for Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple in FaberNovel’s Gafanomics^[10]) and are becoming the best representatives of the “intangible corporations” that are dominating today’s world of business. These platforms need smaller and leaner staff, work on digital and on-demand infrastructure and invest money mostly on improving user experiences (UXs) through design, while they sustain the growth in demand and supply through brand awareness and marketing. Airbnb is not just avoiding building hotels, but neither is building data centers.

As University of Oxford’s Professor Colin Mayer said earlier on this year, playing on a famous Shakespeare quote: “all that ends this strange eventful history is the mindful corporation: sans machines, sans man, sans money, sans everything.”

As a reinforcing trend we must consider that, in many cases, markets are also struggling to cope with the bubbling valuations that companies from the social era are eventually reaching: as Indy Johar pointed out at a panel days ago again at OuiShare Fest, there is no way that a company like Twitter could cope with its IPO valuation by means of its revenues; we should maybe just agree to the idea that such a company is more of an institution of the XXI century than a for profit company and start treating it as such. The more these companies empower not only other companies and brands, but also public institutions and citizens to exist and thrive, the more it will be likely hard to consider only their revenues to justify their market valuation: they should be considered forms of public good or – in a way – expressions of the Commons.

The transformation of the Firm

This transition to post-industrial, networked model of markets and firms is not having effects only on the business model side: in a recent essay, Geoffrey Moore looked at Coase’s seminal “The Nature of the Firm” from 1937 and explored the deep changes that the digitally transformed economy is having on the structure of the firm itself. If on one end, the transition into the “age of access” is transforming products into services and empowering the “on demand” economy, on the other hand, the growing demand for the firm to be able to act as a pivotal point, interact and collaborate with partners working from the outside (whether through an UpWork^[11] contract or an API^[12]) is being deeply disruptive to the hierarchical management structures that provided middle-management, middle-class jobs for most of the twentieth century.

In his recent book “The Utopia of Rules”, eminent American anthropologist David Graeber looks into the topic from a slightly different angle. Probably not underestimating, but consciously putting more emphasis on sociologic aspects than on the digital disruption itself, Graeber highlights the effects of the transition in the longer term, where a lot of people will be losing “bullshit”, bureaucratic, jobs (as he dubs them) to an algorithm, a piece of code or just to the very existence of the internet, as the infrastructures upon which we build shared knowledge, information and data, within time.

Despite the inspiring work of visionaries like Peter Drucker or Taichi Ono, for decades, we built firms that became like institutions: they provided a safe harbor for people, attached to the protestant ethic of work which shaped societies in the industrial age– with work to be done irrespectively of the value it brings to the worker, the customer, or society. Now that the internet changed everything, companies (or better, employees, people) fail to cope with the emergence of a new ethic: the hacker ethic of work. According to this new ethic, work should be enjoyable, meaningful and fun: this, in the end, is undoubtedly a shared item of culture between Silicon Valley Stanford tech laureates (and dropouts) and most of the digital commoners praising Commons Based Peer Production (CBPP in the rest of the article) and collaborative models.

Today’s successful firm is horizontal, lean, efficient, co-creative and talent sensitive and a swath of middle-class jobs will be the victim of this shift: moving from an economy dominated by large leviathans and obese institutions to one where smaller, nimbler, firms will literally “eat” chunks of the economy away as Marc Andressen once explained with his now famous “software is eating the world” mantra.

For those that can embrace this new “ethic of work”, Internet and emerging technologies not only become enablers of a new – post industrial – production model but could be, in fact, instruments of “liberation”: they can shift power from the corporation to the employee, following the same shift in power that in the last few years put the user in charge of the digital experience and that pushed back all the risk on the vendor – in the “on demand” economy.

A new era of independent (or rather inter-dependent) work, driven by passion and meaning, looks sometimes at hand: as Esko Kilpi^[13] puts it

“The Internet is the first communication environment that decentralizes the financial capital requirements of production […] capital is not only distributed, but also largely owned by the workers, the individuals, who themselves own […] the new machines of work. […] the future will not be about jobs, but about tasks and interdependence between people […] Can companies perhaps be replaced by apps in some cases? Or can managers be replaced by apps? Or perhaps more and more new companies look like apps, like Uber or Airbnb already do.”

Wrong points of confrontation between cognitive capitalism and the Commons

Given that in the technological innovation process a role seems to be there for both, private interest driven capital(ism) and CBPP collaborative models based on the knowledge commons: why are we often stuck in a polarized perspective that opposes the two?

The best place to start, to give an extensive coverage of a modern and substantially shared vision of the world of the commons and of the promoter of a Commons Based Peer Production model, is of course the excellent work recently done in “Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy” by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis.

Image: The P2P Infrastructure: Two axes and four future scenarios^[14]

In his famous taxonomy, Michel Bauwens uses two axis to classify the fruits of the digitally transformed economy in two macro areas: capital on one end and the commons, on the other. Bauwens first defines as ‘netarchical capitalism’, more or less what we defined earlier as Platform Based Peer Production and Networked Business models. It is the first combination (upper-left) “which matches centralized control of a distributed infrastructure with an orientation towards the accumulation of capital“.

A first potential misunderstanding here, is occurring when mixing the concept of different layers: infrastructures and platforms. This misunderstanding could be clearly recognized by this essential passage of Bauwens saying that “ultimately, the driving force of capitalism in our age is the eradication of all Commons and the commodification of all things”. Although one could easily agree with the first part, it’s harder to agree to the latter, and I’ll explain why.

The P2P Infrastructure: Netarchical Capitalism^[15]

By assimilating platforms and infrastructures we underestimate the evolutionary aspect: while infrastructures evolve towards becoming utilities completing the whole evolutionary path (from chaotic, unique and novel to ubiquitous^[16]), platforms often don’t, or at least they don’t entirely. Indeed, platforms keep part of their value proposition in a constant creative phase, continuing to improve user experiences and climbing up the value chain constantly by listening to the needs of their ecosystem of users: platforms effectively chose what components can be commoditized and what shouldn’t.  As an example, that may help to clarify, we could mention the brilliant move by which – after attentively monitoring the use that the ecosystem was doing of its services – Amazon introduced Elastic Map Reduce (EMR). EMR is an environment for Big Data processing that, once introduced, pretty much instantly reduced such feature to a commodity, putting unbearable pressure on all third parties previously providing such a service on top of Amazon owned environment.

The evolution of human activities – Simon Wardley^[17]

This is a unique trait of platforms and ecosystems – which is made possible by pools of design talent and by a strategic hegemony – it produces two essential effects. First, these network orchestrators often create significant improvement in user experienced use value and – secondly – they create what is normally called “customer driven value” by exploring and testing new hypothesis of value all the time with customers. How many times have you heard of new upcoming features on Facebook being tested on a particular set of users? How many times a beta product program remained inaccessible for you to use just because you weren’t in the elected set of users? This is what a scientific, lean, experimental entrepreneurial thinking calls A/B testing. You may be in the A or B set of users but, at the end of the day, a new feature will be officially rolled out to everyone only after an evident customer appreciation and validation phase.

In search for a new ethical approach to design?

As an effect of multiple drivers, including the disrupting nature of their value propositions, their design hegemony and the capability that some key cognitive capitalism hubs have – the most important of it being the ecosystem of the Silicon Valley – to create global narratives, these successful platforms can occasionally grow into global, quasi-monopolies and this trait generates increasing concerns in analysts, users and commenters.

If we look into the problem from a liberal perspective, of those who believe that free markets can generate innovation (being able to allocate scarce resources to the ones which are able to use them best) better than non-market economies, these monopolies are just products of exponentially connected market dynamics. As Peter Thiel puts it “competition is for losers”^[18]: businesses that succeed to escape competition by growing into monopolies can stop focusing on the “daily struggle for survival” (indeed an attribute of utilities and commodities) and can focus on creating longer term empowering innovations – in the interest of backing shareholder capital that, most of the times when we talk of true enabling innovations, collides with the interest of the whole society.

At least partially converging with this vision, in an excellent write up of recent Nobel laureate French Professor Jean Tirole’s work, Financial Times’ Izabella Kaminska recaps that “in some markets, particular idiosyncrasies can lead to longstanding dominant positions which need to be smartly regulated in a way that doesn’t overly penalise innovators” and that regulations (which usually express the interest of the public and, therefore, should embed the protection of the commons) should “make sure there’s a level playing field, that the platforms are empowering rather than restricting and the interests of the wider economy are defended”.

In other words: while the position of the regulator should be that of the referee, there’s a big deal of complexity in trying to avoid to penalize someone for having invented a new market and for having followed customer advice in doing so. The good old antitrust mission becomes harder when companies don’t just compete in markets that we have known for decades but instead create new ones of which they, clearly, often become key players.

It’s key to ask whether these “empowering monopolies” are not only the result of the digital transformation but also evolutions which are dictated by us, the users. In the third digital wave, technology is not just integrated into products or used to increase sales but it is meant to help users to achieve their personal goals, to empower them. The users that we “formerly called consumers” and now “funders, producers, sellers and distributors” – according to Jeremiah Owyang – are taking control of their digital identity and learning how to extract value from it by using platform of which they increasingly shape the narratives and value proposition. In the process users will be increasingly taking control of the firm itself: it is Customer Driven Capitalism (or Peer driven if you prefer).

Of course, the situation can be nuanced: the tendency to grow every single platform layer into a global monopoly looks like an attribute of the digital marketplace in itself – more than that of a single firm –  but there’s still the choice (for each brand and firm) to pursue the challenge to avoid the survival struggle in a more or less ethical fashion.

Dysfunctional Platforms?

In particular, two dysfunctional issues are often identified and pointed out as key elements of friction between these global platforms and the common and desirable good. On one hand these platforms are accused to proletarize contributing peers and not sharing enough of the value they create thanks to them: the critics range from pointing out that Uber drivers may be working on a wage that is apparently lower than the US minimum, up to considering posting data into facebook as a form of distributed free labor. If one looks into Travis Kalanick’s famous quote “the reason Uber could be expensive is because you’re not just paying for the car — you’re paying for the dude in the car” one can easily understand that the position of the driver, in this business vision, is evidently that of a – soon to be expandable – part of the supply chain.

The relationship between peers and platforms by the way, must always be considered from the perspective of the peer itself (as an entity). Only the peer’s perception of value is decisive: the peer’s trust towards the platform is key and the relationship strongly goes into intangible realms that can be hardly measured and regulated. In other words, the social agreement between Facebook and its user – with the former providing to the latter the possibility to leverage a wider social graph to accompany her own objectives – could be out of the typical scope of regulatory policymakers. A different discussion – of course – could be applied to Uber’s agreements with drivers: this is a much clearer form of labor that should be regulated according to the existing labor protection laws (as it can generate clear externalities on society), but just as long as Uber still has to employ people in its business process.

Another key dysfunction often pointed out with such platforms relates to their tendency to create walled gardens, used to lock in data and enclose collective intelligence: however this property could not be interpreted as dysfunction but instead as a “feature” and a strategic lever for a platform designer to choose. There are evident plus in keeping data under control if you’re a monopolistic platform as long as this doesn’t become harming to the platform’s reputation and business. In other situations, opening the data layer might be just a different strategic choice to win on markets.

Distributed capitalism or Socialized Infrastructures?

On the same side of the four quadrant model – that of “capital” – but on the lower-left quadrant, Bauwens and Kostakis put a much more unclear concept to me (with respect to that of platforms of netarchical capitalism): that of “distributed capitalism”. The very same key examples mentioned to give substance to this quadrant, the crowdfunding portal Kickstarter on one hand and the distributed crypto currency Bitcoin on the other, are scarcely similar. The first is indeed mostly a “brand” which is able to build, share and give visibility to user crafted narratives: it is more a storytelling tool than even resembles the nature of a netarchical platform. The latter leans more towards being the first incarnation of a really interesting distributed and shared “infrastructure” (the Bitcoin Blockchain) which carries an embedded incentive mechanism to be built from scratch (the Bitcoin itself) and which is now being increasingly used to empower different transaction based ecosystems thanks, for example, to tools like the “colored” coins, lately adopted even by organizations such as the Nasdaq.

The P2P Infrastructure: Distributed Capitalism^[19]

On the other side of the map, Kostakis and Bauwens see a dual nature of the commons taking shape and encompassing all the potential and needs for efficiency and innovation:  according to the writers, and to the vast majority of digital commoners who agree, “resilient communities” – sometimes seen as local lifeboat strategies in a scenario of crash and uncertainty – “can co-exist in harmony within the scenario of the global Commons by the logic that whatever is heavy is local (for instance, desktop manufacturing technologies), and whatever is light is global (for instance, global knowledge)”.

But who’s going to innovate radically? And where can we actually use the Commons?

Despite the fact that we can’t deny that innovation is becoming more and more distributed, social and diffuse, “an emergent property of networks rather than an internal R&D affair within corporations” as per Bauwens and Kostakis, and that the “Apache web server, Mozilla Firefox browser, Linux kernel, [… ] and a myriad of emerging open source software and hardware projects“ have been created in Commons Based Peer Production environments, there are at least two factors that are underestimated or, in my opinion, wrongly interpreted when we credit commons based, collaborative systems the capability to innovate radically.

First of all, while is true that “capital is becoming an a posteriori intervention in the realization of innovation rather than a condition for its occurrence” (Bauwens and Kostakis) we tend to underestimate the importance that capital and talent have in combining, transforming and distributing elements of innovation to larger audiences. Even if Linux and GNU were invented by one nerd and a revolutionary thinker, GNU/Linux definitely took off in the market when brands such as IBM and Google decided to base their industrial strategies on it and democratized Enterprise IT and obile in the move.

Secondly, a relevant distinction here must be made between two different concepts we are talking about: interfaces and infrastructures. I will try to explain this difference by using two very seminal works that have been released in the last year. In a very fortunate recently published article, Boston Consulting Group^[20] describes the digital marketplace as made of mainly three players/roles: “infrastructures on the bottom, producing and consuming, communities on the top, and traditional oligopolists competing in the middle”; it leaves “platform” in a mixed state, sometimes leaning into infrastructures, sometimes into communities.

By merging this vision with the one explained in the seminal “The hero’s Journey through the landscape of the future” ^[21]– which praises a vision of the digital marketplace made of infrastructures, customer relationship businesses (essentially platforms) and long tail markets (communities), the joint vision we can propose today is that of a digital marketplace made of several infrastructural layers, stacked one on top of another and connected between “interfaces”, acting as a common language or, at least, a standard of communication and exchange.

Most of the time, the Commons play a great role and succeed when it comes to becoming interfaces, while they struggle to become infrastructures: a good example might be the Android OS, Linux or even the younger – and more discussed – Arduino’s set of open designs and code library. These commons of code, knowledge or design become standards, sit between layered infrastructures and platforms and push players to innovate at lower or upper layers: no one reinvents the electricity socket or the Metric System (if not Britons).

The infrastructure layer for its part is sometimes too complex to build as a commons: look at  the ubiquitous infrastructure of mobile data connectivity which is, no-doubt, one of the major enabler of the digital transformation we are living: this layer is being strongly commoditized and is now subject to strong global consolidation trends, due to the massive demand of CAPEX (CAPital EXpenditures^[22])  investments that are characterizing 5G and beyond technologies.

Sometimes, despite the complexities, the culture of the commons and an open, accessible and decentralized model can penetrate the infrastructure realm; however this normally happens in a limited set of contexts, when the capital needed to build a node of the infrastructure is smaller than that what a single peer or coherent community can afford.

Also in that case we must not forget that the knowledge, services and materials needed to build that node are likely coming from a lower layer of the stack such as, for example, supply chains or global retailers.

This is more or less what happened with the Bitcoin Blockchain: people started accumulating and buying Bitcoin mining devices – even designing dedicated ASIC chips – sourcing it from the consolidated Chinese consumer electronics industry and connected them though another existing infrastructure, the internet; all this was driven by the incentive of gaining Bitcoins. But what did this enable? Humanity now owns a truly distributed infrastructure, an accessible ledger that can be algorithmically trusted (effectively, a Commons) and that can be used to create almost every transaction based system with little or no upfront investments anymore. Like the “Cloud” for transactional system with the difference that no one really owns the infrastructure (differently from the Cloud which, in the words of security consultant Graham Cluley it’s just “someone else’s computer”).

The same is happening with Fablabs – of which almost 450 are already available worldwide and 400 more are in the making: communities source machines and components from existing industries, they build labs and interconnect them into the Fablab network (through the internet); within time they built their own academy of knowledge and this network is silently incubating a revolutionary manufacturing infrastructure that is local, efficient and owned by people and community institutions. An infrastructure that has been effectively “socialized”.

Building socialized, shared and commons based infrastructure is a quest worth pursuing: more than trying to socialize customer relationship platforms such as marketplaces. It is much more important to own, govern and control (in the Commons), a production infrastructure or network rather than a website connecting demand and supply or making new products possible: this task always was a matter of design, talent, entrepreneurship and creativity, something cognitive capitalism is designed for.

In conclusion, I think we should rethink and rebuild a more complete understanding of the roles of the key players in today’s processes of innovation: the perspective should be that of coexistence between competitive and collaborative models. Only by harmonizing the innovative potential of vision, talent, leadership and private initiative to create enabling innovations – the ones that Thiel calls zero to one^[23] – and the democratizing and harmonizing potential of the open and collaborative Commons we can probably get a decisive takeoff toward an era of abundance.

References.

^[1] 2009. “Technological revolutions and techno-economic paradigms”, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 34, No.1, pp. 185-202

^[2] Post-Capitalism Will Be Post-Industrial <http://bit.ly/1AEMure> [Retrieved 15 may 2015]

^[3] A world awash in money November 14, 2012 Bain report By Karen Harris, Andrew Schwedel and Austin Kim <http://bit.ly/1KH7O2p> [Retrieved 15 may 2015]

^[4] Adopt Digital Age Business Models to Prosper <http://bit.ly/1Jj0Vmf> [Retrieved 15 may 2015]

^[5] Ocean Tomo Releases 2015 Annual Study of Intangible Asset Market Value <http://bit.ly/1I3UH86> [Retrieved 15 may 2015]

^[6] Original Equipment Manufacturers

^[7] Union Square Ventures – A venture capital fund based in New York

[8] Source: From Nick Grossman’s blog – Venture Capital vs Community Capital <http://bit.ly/1AENMTk> [Retrieved 15 may 2015]. The green boxes are companies, and the blue bubbles are “open” technologies like free software and open protocols — i.e., venture capital and community capital, respectively

^[9] Ibid.

^[10] Gafanomics – Fabernovel <http://www.fabernovel.com/gafa/> [Retrieved 15 may 2015]

^[11] Upwork, formerly Elance-oDesk, is a global online work platform where businesses and independent professionals connect and collaborate remotely. Based in Mountain View and San Francisco, California, Upwork was launched on May 5, 2015 <https://www.upwork.com/> [Retrieved 15 may 2015]

^[12] Application Programming Interface

^[13] From Jobs to Gigs and from the Value Chain to the Internet <http://bit.ly/1d8Uh5J> [Retrieved 15 may 2015]

^[14] Source: Bauwens, M and Kostakis V. (2014) Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy (New York: Palgrave Pivot) <http://p2pfoundation.net/&gt;  [Retrieved 15 may 2015]. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

^[15] Ibid.

^[16] Simon Wardley – Evolution, diffusion, hype cycle and early failures. <http://bit.ly/1JdlrWL> [Retrieved 15 may 2015]

^[17] Source <http://blog.gardeviance.org/> [Retrieved 15 may 2015]. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

^[18] Competition Is for Losers <http://on.wsj.com/1SPONgI> [Retrieved 15 may 2015]

^[19] Source: Bauwens, M and Kostakis V. (2014). Ibid.

^[20] BORGES’ MAP – Navigating a World of Digital Disruption by Philip Evans & Patrick Forth <http://on.bcg.com/1QjGNk3> [Retrieved 15 may 2015]

^[21] Hagel, J. et al. (2014). The hero’s Journey through the landscape of the future Deloitte. University Press <http://bit.ly/1FOrahZ> [Retrieved 15 may 2015]

^[22] Capital expenditures (CAPEX or capex) are expenditures altering the future of the business. A capital expenditure is incurred when a business spends money either to buy fixed assets or to add to the value of an existing fixed asset with a useful life extending beyond the taxable year.

^[23] Thiel, P. (2014). Zero to one (New York: Crown Business)

The book, released in February, seems more a natural evolution of Graeber’s thought about capitalism and the world of modern management: indeed he already touched the topic of corporates and large organizations in 2013 thanks to a short but incredibly profound essay called “On the phenomenon of bullshit shit jobs”. The essay was focused on explaining how the conservative power of modern capitalism is exercised through false incentives. Graeber spoke bluntly of the world’s largest organization, the corporations, as an army of workers:  “basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.”

According to Graeber, one of the major innovations of the nineteenth century was the transformation of the postal system born around the Holy Roman Empire (and later evolved around the German army) in a modern system of public post, which became the symbol and the champion of German efficiency. The efficiency of the system was so greatly recognized at the time that even Lenin observed that to organize the whole economy on the lines of the German postal service would be an appropriate target for the revolution. The term “postalization” was often used to identify the industrialization phase of basic public services first, and then of modern capitalism corporations: our whole society has thus over time embraced the model as a symbol of efficiency, transforming it into what we now call bureaucracy and industry.

A “sticky” nature is built-in in the “bureaucratic” systems: once one of these systems makes its way into the economy is indeed difficult to change; a bureaucratic structure created to address a problem in fact ends up creating other problems that can be solved only with typical means of the same bureaucracy. As Graeber says: “once a bureaucracy has been created, it will immediately move to make itself indispensable to anyone trying to wield power, no matter what they wish to do with it. The chief way to do this is always by attempting to monopolise access to certain key types of information”

The Protestant Ethic of Work vs The Hacker Ethic of Work

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Max Weber – a German philosopher, considered one of the fathers of sociology – wrote a particularly interesting essay: “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” in which he argued that modern – and bureaucratic – capitalism was born from the affirmation of a Protestant work ethic that came from northern Europe.

The Weberian vision was that bureaucracy is an organizing tool of the potential of the industrial revolution, a tool needed to control and rationalize industrial production capacity. In the Protestant ethic of work, work is seen as an end in itself (to avoid idleness, which can lead to sin) and should be considered as a duty: thus the assigned work must be done, regardless of its value. As Weber, quoted by Graeber in an earlier article for the presentation of the book, says “Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret . . . in so far as it can, it hides its knowledge and action from criticism” thus expressing the conservative nature of bureaucracy itself: maintaining order and efficiency in public administration, perpetuating a state of sufficient profitability in the industrial business.

Somehow in response – or tribute – to Max Weber’s and his “Protestant Ethic” in 2001, the Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen, wrote the “Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age”. Himanen’s book investigates the core of informationalism, the technological paradigm that replaces and subsumes the previous paradigm of industrialism, mostly thanks to the collapse of transaction cost related with the blossoming of the information age.

It was mostly the discovery of the relationship between the transaction cost and the “Nature of the Firm” that yielded to R.Coase, a late Nobel Prize for Economics in 1991: Coase seminal article from 1937 offered an economic explanation of why individuals choose to form companies and organizations rather than trading bilaterally through contracts on a market: bureaucracies could more efficiently organize needs and capabilities in an age of high transaction cost.

“Only” fifteen years after Himanen’s book, a prophet of business thinking such as Geoffrey Moore looks at Coase’s seminal “The Nature of the Firm” and explores the deep changes that the digitally transformed economy is having on the structure of the firm itself.
According to Moore, the transition to post-industrial, information, age is finally getting to maturation and having effects not only on the business models (with the rise of the “age of access” and “on demand” economy) but also onto the very nature of the firm itself.

The growing demand for the firm to act as a pivotal point – interact and collaborate with partners and peers – is being deeply disruptive to the hierarchical and bureaucratic management structures that provided the motivation for the existence of an entire class of middle-management, middle-class jobs for most of the twentieth century.

The transition from corporate bureaucracies to digital empires is, according to Greg Satell, so relevant that he defines Platforms as “bureaucracies for the networked age“.

Ultimately you go then, gradually and with huge differences between different industries, from an industrial perspective, of a linear relationship between firms and the market to one which is networked and post-industrial. While in the first, the company (capital) owns the means of production and workers access them to produce products and services to be marketed, In the latter the market is reticular and indistinguishable from the society, the means of production are dispersed and accessible and companies have the main aim of connecting supply and demand and facilitating the “citizen producer”.

It is therefore impossible, recognizing how the maturation and the ubiquity of the networks and the social web transformed the structure of society in a “grid”, not to overcome the “linear” logic of business typical of industrial production. Is therefore necessary, in companies and organizations – and eventually in ourselves – to adopt a new attitude, a new work ethic.

But what can then be the guiding spirit, the basic ethics of this transformation? Himanen (and others) identify this in the hacker ethic. In the hacker ethic of work, work has to be interesting and fun and, above all, must create value for the worker, the organization and for society as a whole. Workers also must have freedom to organize their work in a way that is more functional to reach their own goals and in the manner that best fits their needs and insights.

A lot of Himanen’s vision can be also seen in the work of historical leaders of organization transformation such as Peter Drucker or in the “learning organization” advocated by Peter Senge where “…people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together”

Exactly in 2001, in conjunction with Himanen’s book release, we witnessed what can be considered among the first incarnations of hacker thinking in the world of production in the information age: in February of that year, in fact, a group of software developers, met to discuss new practices and methods of software development and gave birth to the “Agile Manifesto”.

This manifesto, made ​​of 12 principles, and four Key aspects was a real break with the world of hierarchies, long term contracts and bureaucratic companies that, in most cases, even after almost 15 years, is still the market that we know and live every day as professionals.

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

The vision embodied by the Agile Manifesto was actually emerging from a cultural background inspired in part from the work of Richard Stallman – the last “true hacker” according to Steven Levy – and other Free software activists. On the other hand this manifesto was built on the legacy of the philosophical revolution of lean manufacturing, that allowed Toyota, thanks to the leadership of Taichi Ono, to transform itself from a small Japanese manufacturer to a leading company in the world.

“Let the flow manage the processes, and not let the management manage the flow” – Taichii Ohno

The Case for Non Bureaucratic Organizations

Clear signs tell us that, today, organizations that embraced a post-industrial transformation and defeated the bureaucracy and rigidity of linear business models are the masters of the market. According to Javi Creus (the passage is taken from PentaGrowth report) these companies “integrate more resources from different origins in their processes, they take better advantage of their users’ capacities, and share tools and resources to enable others to develop their own businesses and lifestyles” and “the value of these organisations is not their volume, but the amplified view of what is available for them […] their advantage is based on scope, not on scale and […] generate value beyond what they need to capture in order to sustain and evolve”.

When we look inside these organizations we suddenly understand that their capabilities also come from the application of a different way of working, that created a work environment that is more productive, happier and generates incredibly better results.

But what does it mean to apply the “hacker ethic of work” in our companies and organizations?

Understanding the market, the hacker way

In the first place, the hacker attitude should be applied to the discovery and understanding of the market. In this sense, companies must be very careful not to fall into the trap of the protection of competitive advantages and incremental innovation. These safe havens cannot last long at today: it will be more important to focus efforts on continually creating tangible value for users. As the “Lean Startup” method can provide a good starting point, “The Four Steps to The Epiphany“- the seminal book from Steve Blank which is a bible for  frugal and effective entrepreneurs – provides guidance for the so-called “Customer Development” process, that wikipedia effectively defines as: “a scientific approach that can be applied by startups and entrepreneurs to improve their products success by developing a better understanding of their consumers. Primary to the concept is a balanced relationship between developing a product and understanding the customer”

A complement of the customer driven innovation point of view can come then from Design Thinking: an approach that is aimed at designing products and innovations around problems and needs of real people (here an old post in which I tried to clarify how Design Thinking and Lean approaches such as Customer Development can coexist).

Such an approach will increase the ability of the company to design and truly understand the needs and objectives of users and, ultimately, will help companies design services that are more meaningful, appreciated and adopted.

Sharing Knowledge, Interfaces and Business Processes

The hacker ethic should also be applied to managing knowledge and should also be infused in the way products and services are designed and brought to the marked. Adopting open source development models and creating standard interfaces, through APIs for example, ultimately making products and services that are open and reusable from others. It is ultimately time to embrace “the great disruptor”, the unbundling, and to do that in a conscious and strategic way. To understand that this approach is not only to be confined in software we can look at a recent initiative from General Electric: the US giant is partnering with Local Motors to launch FirstBuild, a strategic initiative for the creation of open, hackable, appliances born from the collaboration with co-creative communities for  products on demand.

Hacking Decision Making towards Stigmergy

Finally, the last and perhaps the most complex level of adoption of the hacker ethic in organizations is the development of a culture of “continuous organization design”. This culture can lead to a continuous redefinition and testing of processes and decision-making techniques, with the aim of achieving a real stigmergic organization (which has the ability to take decisions and explore strategies organically, close to where the problems and opportunities arise). Even if some organizational innovation protocols exist today – such well known Holacracy or award winning Liquido, the winning organizations will be those able to know these practices and make, after careful experimentation, their way to organization transformation.

Another key pillar of an organization that truly wants to promote a new work ethic should be the paradigm of co-creation: today, co-creative practices shall be primary choices for what  regards identifying strategies and make decisions.

A good starting point to understand what does it mean to co-create in teams can be found in the fundamental Gamestorming from Dave Gray– not only a very good book but also a very useful community portal (Gamestorming) – where to find descriptions of dozens of “business innovation games” and methods of co-creation to be used as bricks to build workshops and work sessions participation. Nilofer Merchant’s Quest process, described in the book “The New How” shall also be a pillar in your library of new ways.

Beyond rethinking corporate culture and organization towards embracing a new work ethic

In a recent beautiful piece of Derrick Bradley entitled “Making Purpose Applicable“, he explained how sometimes in organizations there is lack of clarity about what the purpose of the work and what guides teams and individuals. According to Bradley, the perfect purpose must be:

• It will engage a team for an unbound amount of time.
• It can be unpacked and individualized for each org level and team.
• Decision lens. It can enable teams to make decisions based on their purpose.
• It can retain the ethos of the organization’s practice.

If we rethink the organization’s mission in this way, it will be better poised to those organizational changes that Frederic Laloux indicates empowered by basic enabling principles such as self-management, stigmergy, completeness and evolutionary mission.

The question is not that of writing new rules but, rather, that of forgetting some of them: in fact, as Feye rabend said once, “inventions and scientific discoveries are often preceded by intentional or accidental violations of generally accepted rules”

Rejecting conformism

Reading this recent interview of Peter Thiel I found in his words reflected some of the “non-conformistic” approach mentioned by Feyerabend: Thiel says “I disagree with the vision of the future where all you have to do is sit back, eat popcorn, and watch the movie of the future unfold” and we can read this sentence as an exhortation not to take anything for granted and think that one small action, a perhaps creative and revolutionary act, can in fact change everything: the future of our organization, our community, our company and, ultimately, the destiny of the whole humanity.

However, this fusion of the creative act, the purpose of research and personal expression will always live with the need for a clutch to create something that the market (which is increasingly overlapped with society) wants: something that, in its way, falls in the schemes.

The reflection that should, therefore, always be with us when we put our energy in a company or we try our best (more or less clearly) to satisfy a given market, it’s that things can, always, be done differently… changing the rules.

A few years ago, Zadie Smith, was in rome during the Festival of Literature, and she said:

“at the heart of creativity there’s refusing. Really creative work it needs to avoid to see the world as others see it, or as it is generally described. It refutes conventional and generic: it renews […]  What if the most creative act to do today is therefore to refuse? To show how unhappy are we to introduce our energies in the well-oiled mechanism of the status quo? To envision a different world appears today as a creative duty.”

In the first place as individuals living today, therefore, we have a duty to face the future with the eagerness not just to see it happen but, rather, to choose to be part of it and give it a different shape.

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Note: Zadie Smith contribution is translated from an italian translation as apparently english version is not available.

This article is partially based on original content posted on CheFuturo http://www.chefuturo.it/author/simonecicero/ (CC-BY-NC-ND)

Picture of Pekka Himanen – CC – BY – SA – Kennisland

The core of the post is related to imagining that our increasingly digital society can accelerate into a takeoff perspective thanks to the coexistence between neoliberal capital and interconnected peer production.

An earlier version of the post is also available in Italian on Chefuturo.

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Just few weeks ago, a wonderful, about half an hour, documentary – amazingly directed by my friend Tristan Copley Smith – was eventually published. This great piece of work, was shot in Barcelona – the Fab City – earlier in 2014, around the beginning of July, during Fab10: the 10^th edition of international Fablab conference.

It was during Fab10 – and the fateful moment is well documented in the video – Mayor Xavier Trias pressed a button and virtual triggered a 40 years countdown: as explained in the video by Vicente Guallart – urbanist and chief architect of the Barcelona municipality – this countdown separates the city from the moment in which it will be globally connected yes, but locally self-sufficient. This narrative is described as the switch from PITO (Product In Trash Out) model to DIDO (Data In Data Out) model.

Another key resource which saw le light recently, was the fifth edition of the Journal of Peer Production , an independent publication that looks into the potential of, peer to peer models. This issue was dedicated to the so-called “shared machine shops”  – places where – as in Fablabs – you share machines and skills to help you fabricate, modify and hack tangible objects and doing this also looked into potential, cultures and limitations of the “makers” movement worldwide.

Rethinking an old production model  

Despite 40 years can be many, radically rethink a production model is an enormously complex challenge. Apparently, challenges go far beyond reach of the most optimistic predictions of the potential of Fablabs and makers alone: this for a set of reasons ranging from – still existing – technology gaps to poor “political” awareness of the movement itself.

In a crucial passage of the opening oped of the Journal, Peter Troxler brutally analyzes the level of understanding that Makers and DIYers have of the complexity of industrial production:

We are so ignorant of the complexity of goods around us that anything beyond assembling a puzzle or an IKEA furniture can be hastily baptized as a DIY achievement […] More pleasant than the mere use of a consumer good, autonomy becomes synonymous with assembly and repair [but] the kit empties DIY of its substance, like a marketing bundle.

In further considerations Troxler explains how makers and fabbers could become nothing but than superconsumers, requiring even more complex products (enabling and extremely customizable) to producers who are thus confronted with technological and design challenges even more:

[…]the tools used and claimed by the “creative and innovative” often mean exactly the opposite for their producers. Without going as far as extracting the necessary minerals for the manufacture of electronic components, it’s hard to imagine that this process is self-managed and fun.

What simplicity is for users, is simplexity for engineers: “making things easier to the user necessarily means having to make them more difficult to the engineer who invents them.”

The issue

Understand how peer to peer, open, collaborative models can play a credible role in the manufacturing industry is key to the extent that such models proved deeply transformative in digital industries. But, where should we start from?

The dominating competition dynamic brought us to the current product manufacturing landscape low margins, slow innovation: think about your washing or your refrigerator, how much did they really evolve in more than a century? Wholly produced – or at least partially – in common factories, with common skills and common machinery by so-called OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer) competing with each other, these products are almost all different, but all the same.

Indeed, to produce more revenues and provide a low-risk investment perspective, mass production runs on two approaches: the first is obviously that of increasing numbers. The costs of building a product line – tooling- impacts less is size of production increase as so does the profitability of each single piece: producing 100 products of a kind  is much less efficient than producing 1000000. Globalization has been the key strategy to achieve such scalability: creating consumers alike around the world allowed to extend revenues, substantially without risks (and real investments in transformative innovation).

On the other side, companies differentiate themselves from the competition increasingly thanks to brands and narratives, reinforced not only by the quality of the products but also by considerable investment in marketing, advertising and storytelling: in the last 35 years, much of the value of the S&P 500 just moved from tangible assets (such as factories ) to brands and intangible assets (stories, consumer trust, brand image).

If, therefore, on the one hand we have been accustomed to thinking that industrial production is market sustainable only if the numbers are big, we see that on the other hand companies themselves tend to become intangible and therefore consider tangible aspects (the “factory”) as a low value phase, which they attempt to entrust to partners and suppliers: can we really say that Apple physically makes iPhone?

But the landscape has changed

State that we Europeans have a very peculiar point of view on such issues – we live in technologically advanced countries going through a huge systemic crisis; but certainly, from our point of view, we can say that the cultural framework and expectations are radically changing. At least four trends increasingly push towards products digitization and the triumph of intangible value over tangible one:

• Hyper Reality: we see more and more products like hybrid experiences, online and offline.
• Era of Access: due to changing perspectives on ownership and cash crisis many product evolve into services and then platforms. Car sharing and carpooling are now ubiquitous in European cities and Uber just reached 40 Billion valuation.
• New Environmental Ethics: users are more aware of the impacts that consumption habits have and try to be more environmentally savvy: a collective karma of urgency to change is spreading
• Ultra-personalization: mass market customization – coined by Paul Eremenko head of Project Ara Google – is the idea that products are in fact eco-systemic customizations (that may be tribal, local and DIY) based on a shared platform. According to Eremenko up to one quarter of product value is in “user-customizable features”.

What should we expect?

From a purely technological point of view there is no doubt that great brands are largely moving into on demand, distributed and digital manufacturing and 3D printing. HP recently announced its new Multi Jet Fusion Technology holds great if not revolutionary promises. Autodesk, among the most innovative companies in the world, just launched a  fund $ 100 Million for 3Dprinting startups.

On a political layer environmental protection regulation may be soon adopted globally: recent agreements between the US and China on climate positively anticipated the meetings that will take place in Paris in July of 2015 and have set goals rather ambitious for the reduction of greenhouse gases: it is still unclear whether the achievement of these goals will go through the application of a Carbon Tax but it is plausible that restrictive policies on use of fossil fuels could be soon adopted. According to The Guardian, Bank of England will soon “conduct an enquiry into the risk of fossil fuel companies causing a major economic crash if future climate change rules render their coal, oil and gas assets worthless”. The case such a environmental friendly regulation takes place is a perspective that becomes more and more credible today. Such regulations would impact primarily on logistic models and, inevitably, would push toward a more responsible manufacturing, which would be more frugal and certainly more decentralized.

In addition an increasing the number of public actors (eg: industrial districts or local policy makers) are interested in developing policies designed to bring manufacturing jobs back to retrace the same globalization processes backwards after having encouraged it over the years.

Meanwhile the bottom-up community of Fablab and makerspace is growing exponentially, already more than 430 – only 350 in July during Fab10 – and may certainly play a role to the extent that it will provide an idle production capacity especially for objects which are designed in a partially different and more “hackable” and repairable way. As rightly said a from my friend and father of Slic3r, Alessandro Ranellucci (edited for clarity):

“given the opportunity to create or retain economic value locally, it looks all very difficult (and perhaps a bit ‘daunting) if we reason in terms of replacement of existing products as we know them – a field on which we have still much to do. Perhaps we need to think in terms of meeting the same needs with new products”

Besides all this we are already seeing new models for the aggregation of locally available production capacity. Although it is closely related to OpenDesk, the English project Fabhub is already a network of production (which aggregates dozens of makers spread almost all over the world) and that could be potentially available for other brands once “unbundled”.

Even in the US, however, projects like Maker’s Row or Britehub are doing more or less the same thing and taking shape as an effective tool for local production, for now intended to creatives and small size brands.

Do not underestimate the role that also true on-demand manufacturing services may have in the future, thanks to improved manufacturing technologies and digital additive manufacturing. Shapeways, a company of Dutch origin that already offers many opportunities for small sizes products on demand manufacturing (from art, to home tools), already slipped on two continents and has its Factory of the Future scattered between Europe and the two coasts of the United States, in an apparent effort to reduce logistics impacts.

They could then one day these players become a new option, a new type of contractor, for global brands and not just small actors ? The question might be asked is: what direction will, in a few decades, these same global brands?

Why do we need to move from Open Innovation in a closed company to shared innovation in open companies?

Besides, the more the (manufacturing) market is digitalized, the more it follows mechanics that I recently explained in a recent piece and will briefly recall. Digitally enabled markets follow the power law (also known as the “Long Tail”) and three roles are available (I will try to tie them to examples in this industry, in order to make it clearer):

• The micro markets of the LongTail: products and services marketplaces where you compete on speed and elasticity and create and nurture niches; brands are short lived and ephemeral and players are small (for example, a designer who creates a product for his fan base).
• The enabling infrastructures: aggregation platforms that offer routine processes (eg. logistics) and support small fragmented players (eg: on demand manufacturing services).
• The customer relationship business: agents that connect and understand market expectations and help products to be created (es: kickstarter or the Arduino community)

In the classic definitions of Open Innovation (those of Henry Chesbrough in “Open Innovation: The new imperative for creating and profiting from technology“) it’s said that ” firms can and should use creative ideas and paths to the market, which are both internal and external, when trying to innovate their technology ” and ” innovate by sharing risk and rewards with partners ” and the boundaries of the firm with society and the ecosystem become more permeable. In the n evolution of the concept of open innovation into what I call shared innovation production companies and brands will have to look at two main challenges.

On the one hand, player from supply chain and infrastructure will need to increasingly be designed as multi stakeholder and cooperate with communities and local governments increasingly configuring as opportunities in their eyes (local jobs). Firms operating in this context will need to leave sub-processes of the manufacturing cycle, such as distribution, post-sale servicing and customization to local players embracing more participative and equitable profit generation chains which are inherently more sustainable ecologically and socially wise. If you choose to operate in infrastructures, it will be important to aggregate production capacity and do so in a transparent and open way at some point exposing APIs that allow to integrate “unbundled” production schemes into far more complex business processes.

On the other hand “interface” products and services will need to be creativity enablers and for meaningful innovations residing in niches and digital communities:  consumers become makers and eventually citizens of a new world we’re all called to participate building. In this cultural space open (source) is a key factor in enabling creators to use and rethink technologies.

Finally, if you work in the area of customer relationship, it will be important to know how to link creativity to opportunities as platforms such as Kickstarter or Quirky are doing, helping a growing base of intelligent communities and creators build a new generation of products.

As Alain De Botton said recently, to build a better version of capitalism – that is able to look at the true needs and do so in a responsible manner – is a huge growth opportunity. Starting with manufacturing is possible and indeed someone is already working on it.

(Disclaimer: I’m involved in OSVehicle)

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