Cows with IP addresses and social networks as modes of production

Dom Tapscott - author of MacroWikinomics - was on great form in his evening lecture at the LSE on Friday. He talk - “Rebooting Business and the World” argued that many established institutions have become atrophied because of the global financial crisis but that a new open network model built around collaborative technologies available through the web provide incredible opportunities to address key challenges in the environment, transport, government, education and health care.

The web is causing profound changes and offering opportunities for new ways of creating wealth. Many organisations are in secular rather than cyclical decline as a host of web technologies have brought about disruptive change - Joseph Schumpeter would have enjoyed every minute of this forensic and deeply interesting presentation. Linux has challenged Microsoft in every conceivable direction. The MP3 player has created waves of creative destruction in the music industry as has Wikipedia and blogging for publishing and newspapers.

Don Tapscott explores the rise of networked intelligence, a new open global web of collaborative platforms populated by a generation bathed in bits who have no fear of technology because it is there - they don’t see it as technology at all. Tapscott drew on five principles - collaboration, openness, sharing (such as Nike’s GreenXChange) interdependence and integrity as core to this new mode of production. And this indeed is what it is. Social networking is evolving into social production - Macro-wikinomics is a journey rich with applications of the ideas.

The LSE presentation offered a huge amount of interesting and thought-provoking observations

*News flow finds customers not the other way round. “If the news is important it will find me”

*In this digital age, businesses are naked - and businesses that are buff must have value and values. Transparency is a new force, consumer feedback loops are incredibly powerful (behavioural economics has much to say on this)

*Education is changing at a rapid speed - many bright kids do not go to lectures, their creative time is better spent on the web engaging with entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists - rather than being lectured about them

*Traditional corporate structures are in free-fall. Seventy years ago the Nobel-Prize winning economist Ronald Coase asked “why does the firm exist”? The collapse of communication, coordination and transactions costs and the un-bundling of vertical integration within one business is a key feature of the age. Focus on what you do best, and partner the rest - open collaboration and joint ventures. Collusion to old timers, best practice to a net generation

In short - the networked age does not replace the industrial age - it changes it fundamentally, cows are now micro chipped and each has their own IP address. Open source software runs nuclear power plants; an open data revolution will change government for ever. Kids in Kenya mobilise on the fly to rescue kids in earthquake-torn Haiti. Businesses recognise that human capital is important, but that it doesn’t have to reside solely within the boundaries of your organisation.

This was a great talk from an accomplished author who gets the web - I have his new book and it will be a super read during half term. Also by Don Tapscott “Smart Swarm: Using Animal Behaviour to Organise Our World”. The Economics of Mass Collaboration (HBR Podcast)

Interview on the Net Generation

2009 TED Talk on the Future of Education

Six Pixels of Separation Podcast with Don Tapscott