The firm of the future may be ten million people working together for ten minutes.
Corporations are the dominant mechanism by which economic activity is organized. Whether there are opportunities for social innovation in the corporate world is hence a key question for the prosperity and well being in the emerging post-industrial society.
Over the past years, intelligent technologies, peer-to-peer cryptocurrencies and the Internet have laid the foundation for a very small size and a very low-cost enterprise with the potential for managing very large numbers of business relationships. The impact of these new actors is still hard to grasp because we are used to thinking about work from a different perspective.
Our thinking arises from a make-and-sell economic model. Most managers still subscribe to this and think that the core of creating value is to plan and manage a supply chain. A firm is accordingly seen as an entity that is separate from the people who work there. After specific financial investments have been made, the firm is defined by the ownership of the assets and the power that the people who made these investments have. As a result of this model, the relationship between the company and the contributors of financial capital is very different from the relationship between the company and the people who work there, the employees.
We are passing through a technological discontinuity of huge proportions. The new programmable economy demands new approaches to value creation. In the mass-market economy, the focus was to create a quality product. With increased global competition that is not enough any more. The focus changes to a joint process of defining and solving contextual problems. You and your customer necessarily then become cooperators. You are together creating value in a way that both satisfies the customer and ensures a profit for you. New economic spaces beyond incumbent firms are emerging.
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