Born out of INSPIRATION: Inspiring vision, direction and clarity of economic thought

Archive for August, 2010

Collaborative nano and micro business ventures

Don’t waste a good crisis” – not entirely sure who first uttered these immortal words, although a Google search on initial analysis seems to attribute it (or some very similar words) to Rahm Emmanuel, the current Chief of Staff of the White House, part of the Barack Obama administration.  The actual phrase might be attributed to an economist called Paul Romer.

However, irrespective of who uttered the words initially, it is true that borne out of crisis the spirit of innovation always seem to rise like a new Phoenix bringing both hope and opportunity with it.

That is the great gift that the ‘study of scarcity’ that is economics provides us with.

We have the chance to think creatively about new platforms of collaboration and how Charles Handy‘s ‘Shamrock Organisation’ will eventually play out.

At the moment we are conducting a research study into how nano and micro businesses might find new routes to market and sustain themselves during these strained economic times as part of the extension of the outsource provider to the Shamrock Organisation.  We will be trying to uncover some of the factors that lead to collaboration and other forms of formal and informal business structures that promote and underpin this form of collaboration.

Please watch this space for updates in the very near future.

theMarketSoul ©2010



Random Collisions of Chance

Chance and spontaneity are two interesting phenomenon required for innovation and creativity.

We were reminded of this in an interview recorded of a LinkedIn executive recently*.  He stated that chance encounters are “where we make some of our most significant connections“, be it your life partner, business associates, etc. and that speeding up those chance encounters was one of the fundamental principles and aims of social networking.

That idea struck a chord with us.  Like our free market principle of ‘Spontaneous Order’, random collisions and network creation, leading to opportunity exploitation and ultimately wealth and welfare maximisation is intuitively an attractive proposition.

The Free Market: A False Idol After All?

So, we have the mechanisms in place, with online tools and social networking sites, but how much of this activity is outward focussed revenue and income generating?  What is meant by this is that the revenues are not focussed on increasing advertising and network operator revenues, but individual participant to participant’s opportunity flows.

And beyond building an online presence with followers and individuals being influencers and thought or trend leaders in their domains, how many of us focus on being revenue leaders and wealth and welfare ‘maximisers’ in this space?

Do you have personal metrics of success, which help inform and modify and moderate your personal behaviours to ensure that you maximise your ‘Return on Ether-time’? [ROET]

Maybe it is well worth a thought because in the neo-classical world of market participation, if you aren’t in the market and making a living (or a half descent living) from it, you might get marginalised and lose out on the wave that hit us when Web 2.0 arrived.

English: A tag cloud (a typical Web 2.0 phenom...

theMarketSoul ©2010

* We are searching for a link / reference to this interview.  Once we have found it, we will update this post