Here are my current and additional thoughts on the subject of the community business venture. Although this writing is a bit of a mixed bag, my overall impression of the venture is, THIS HAS TO BE THE GREAT MOTHER OF ALL CROWDSOURCING PROJECTS.
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Here are my current and additional thoughts on the subject of the community business venture. Although this writing is a bit of a mixed bag, my overall impression of the venture is, THIS HAS TO BE THE GREAT MOTHER OF ALL CROWDSOURCING PROJECTS.
Count me in. As far as I can tell there is pervasive bad news, and from all viewpoints, the ugly fact that the Calvary is not coming to save us. We have just seen from the 2016 presidential election the impotence of our politicians regarding economic inequality. This means we will have to rectify this wrong ourselves. This business idea is a way for us to do it. Here is my review at least from an eclectic mix of perspectives.
I recall reading a recent research paper about combining the responses of multiple rat brains over the internet to form a type of living rat brain computer. It was a thought-provoking article but more importantly was one of the comments. It was in response to what would happen if you were to hook 10,000 rat brains together into one giant computer. To paraphrase, the comment said, " now you cats better watch out."
I think FRC, through its crowdsourcing capability, has a parallel way to accomplish this. And yes, the fat cats better watch out.
Well maybe we of the 99% can be herded after all.
As for anyone who does not believe a change in our economic system is needed, or anyone who is willfully denying what is happening around them regarding economic inequality, I offer the following recent article painting a bleak picture related to your future ability to be gainfully employed. e]
From: Techsite America’s Dazzling Tech Boom Has a Downside: Not Enough Jobs
Posted by Keith Maldonado originally from wsj.com 10-13-2016
http://www.techsite.io/p/458795
The technology revolution has delivered Google searches, Facebook friends, iPhone apps, Twitter rants and shopping for almost anything on Amazon, all in the past decade and a half. What it hasn't delivered are many jobs. Google's Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. had at the end of last year a total of 74,505 employees, about one-third fewer than Microsoft Corp. even though their combined stock-market value is twice as big.
There is a growing sense of frustration that people haven t seen the progress that their parents and grandparents did, says Erik Brynjolfsson, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist whose work has chronicled how technology widens the income gap between rich and poor.
So, what is the answer? What are we to do?
Here is a question being asked about crowdsourcing the formation of a corporation by an organization called Younomy. This is rather prescient as it seems to be a 2012 interview. Although the individual being interviewed does not answer the question directly he does imply crowdsourcing can give a competitive advantage by tapping into the wisdom of the crowd. It look like our crowdsourcing community will be answering this question directly with the FRC project.
Younomy, GuruSpeak Mr Soren Ingomar Petersen, CEO, Ingomar&Ingomar (2012) "Crowdsourcing: Leverages the Inherent Human Social Behavior of Reciprocity" Younomy: It ... What are your crowd sourcing predictions for 2012 and beyond?
Younomy: People crowd source product ideas, and financial resources to help their ideas come to life. So, if we have crowd sourced cars, and crowd sourced investment then why not a crowd sourced corporation? What are other potential areas that can be crowdsourced in business?
Soren Ingomar Petersen: Every human interaction is a form of business and only a small number of these interactions involve an exchange of money to facilitate transactions. Money is the storage of reciprocity. Crowdsourcing super charges interactions by rapidly and economically tapping into the wisdom of the crowd, supporting exponential progress, as well as demise. One's ability to frame, guide, sustain and interpret the online conversation on a large scale can translate into a competitive advantage.
Younomy goes on in another blog to talk in detail about crowdsourcing corporations in a somewhat tangent way to FirstRateCrowd.
younomy.blogspot.com/2012/.../making-of-crowdsourced-corporate.ht...
If organizations can crowd source all the ideas they need to run their entire business operations, they ... Posted 27th February 2012 by Sankar Narayanan
Making of a Crowdsourced Corporate
If organizations can crowd source all the ideas they need to run their entire business operations, they become a truly Crowd Sourced Corporate! At Younomy, we have recently introduced a new concept around open innovation, and we call it the “Open Corporate Pyramid”. The concept likens a business entity to a pyramid. Just like an Egyptian pyramid, the Open Corporate Pyramid has chambers and vaults. The difference is that these chambers are ideation chambers and the vaults are used to capture business ideas.
You can have a detailed description here. We say that organizations can run open innovation events to collect following types of ideas (fifteen in total): customer needs, brand promises, delivery strategies, product/service quality (better), cost effectiveness (cheaper), product performance (faster), customer relations, employee and vendor relations, investor relations, public relations, solid waste management, solutions for air pollution, clean water, energy efficiency, and eco-system protection.
Corporates too can begin to organize innovation events such as unconferences, crowd sourcing campaigns, contests, and so on around one innovation thrust area, before replicating the success in other areas. There are different types of innovation processes, and formats. Younomy will be profiling some of the best practices in open innovation, co-creation in the future.
But FirstRateCrowd goes much further with the extra steps of turning the corporation over to the community. And, if given the right environment of freedom and responsibility, I think the FRC project will be successful. The following excerpt from the Harvard Business Lends support to this idea.]
From the Harvard Business Review
Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner
From the April 2013 Issue
By Kevin J Boudreau and Karim R Lakhani
Although we of the crowd may be hard to control, given the right mix to allow for our diversity along with guidance and rewards, cohesiveness can be accomplished.
"The strength of the community is its diversity, but it lacks cohesiveness. Companies create cohesion with structures and systems (such as incentives) that align values. They hire employees for “fit” and colocate them so that they can interact directly, become socialized, and share a culture. Moreover, employees gain specific experience and knowledge in the narrow fields where the company focuses. A crowd, in contrast, may draw participants from around the globe—from varying companies, domains, and industries—who have their own interests and motivations. That makes crowds harder to control."
Yes, crowds are harder to control, but with the proper forethought it can be done successfully.
I can also envision turning the corporate paradigm on its head. Why should we work for the corporations when the corporations should work for us. FirstRateCrowd could very well become the new model for how corporations act and function when a community wants to reduce economic inequality. Given the rapid expansion of crowdsourcing at the corporate level, maybe we should now have the tail wagging the dog. And from the looks of things, it is a very long tail as indicated below.
Deloitte
The three billion Enterprise crowdsourcing and the growing fragmentation of
© 2016 Deloitte LLP. All rights reserved.
Deloitte LLP is a limited liability partnership registered in England and Wales with registered number OC303675 and its registered office at 2 New Street Square, London EC4A 3BZ, United Kingdom. Tel: +44 (0) 20 7936 3000 .
Designed and produced by The Creative Studio at Deloitte, London. J6256
By: Vimi Grewal-Carr
Managing Partner for Innovation
+44 (0)20 7303 7859
vgrewalcarr@deloitte.co.uk
By: Carl Bates
Partner, Lead for Crowdsourcing
+44 (0)20 7007 7590
carbates@deloitte.co.uk
"Once seen as the preserve of obscure state-sponsored competitions or corporate innovation projects, crowdsourcing is now considered mainstream, increasingly embedded in the core business activities of small and large enterprises alike.In 2014, Gartner predicted that 75 per cent of high-performing enterprises will use crowdsourcing in some form by 2018."
The business world is certainly ready for a paradigm shift and crowdsourcing is the lever to accomplish it. Combine this with the mind-blowing power of the 99%'s desire to reduce economic inequality by doing good in the world and we have a winning combination. Like most human endeavors, a critical mass of individuals is needed. If your traditional work experience is anything like mine, (I will leave out the horror stories for now), then through our joined effort the shift will happen. However, it will need to be revolutionary; but the word revolution needs to be carefully explained in the context of the FirstRateCrowd model.
From: Merriam-Webster: Simple Definition of revolution : a sudden, extreme, or complete change in the way people live, work, etc.
Clearly, we can see the traditional corporate-centric form of capitalism, which has been around for hundreds of years, is ripe for change.
As a refresher...
From: Study.com, Intro to Business: What is a Paradigm Shift in Business? Instructor: Natalie Purcell
A paradigm is a perception or a group of ideas about how things should be done, made, or thought about. In other words, it's your perspective on the world, your point of view, or your beliefs about what's true. A paradigm shift occurs whenever there's a significant change in the way an individual or a group perceives something, and the old paradigm is replaced by a new way of thinking, or a new belief.
Individuals have their own personal paradigms, or lenses through which they view the world. Corporations and other organizations have corporate paradigms regarding the methods by which they believe their goals will best be accomplished.
So, continuing on the theme of a business revolution, I also found the following generalization.
From: wikiHow to Start a Revolution
To create a revolution, you need to unite people around a shared purpose. It’s possible to start a revolution, although it can take a lot of patience, organization, and passion. It will be more likely to succeed if you don’t wing it. A revolution (from the Latin revolutio, "a turnaround") is a significant change that usually occurs in a short period of time.
But I think one critical element is missing from the WikiHow process and that is having the necessary financial capacity in place in many instances before starting. The FRC business venture can supply this necessary financial capacity for our use. Also, from what I have seen, the more people are on the line, meaning they have "skin in the game",the more they are willing to participate. Economic inequality puts at least 99% of the people in the world in just such a position. Just here in the USA, that puts approximately 317 million individuals into play. The idea is to take these individuals and focus them around a cause; the cause is their own survival. No doubt, regardless of an individual's knowledge level about economic inequality, there is an instinctual fear that something is wrong. If nothing else, fear will get a person motivated as a shared purpose.
I have had the good fortune to speak with Dr. Heetun on numerous occasions regarding her goal relative to FirstRateCrowd. Needless to say, she is passionate about stopping economic inequality. Moreover she rails against any form of inequality be it racial, religious, or sexual. However, her main focus remains on economic inequality. Her clarity of thought regarding this issue stems from the fact that much of the world's suffering stems from this one dominant issue. This includes the creation and exacerbation of those inequalities mentioned above.
Revolutions, as in the colloquial sense of overthrowing a government or economic system, are many times rapid, explosive, bloody, and with unpredictable results. Yet I hear many people calling for revolution in this manner without really thinking about the real consequences. For example, the Civil War here the USA caused approximately 750,000 deaths. This accounted for about 2.5% of the population at that time being lost. In today's terms, with a USA population of nearly 320 million people, this percentage is equivalent to the loss of 8.13 million people. To put this into perspective, nearly all of our largest city, New York City with its 8.5 million people, would be annihilated. It would mean a massive amount of suffering and this does not even account for the associated morbidity.
From our discussions, Dr. Heetun has expressed to me her desire not to invoke this type of radical revolution. Rather it would be the nature of the non-violent type of revolution. This involves creating change more in line with the philosophy of Gandhi's non-violent resistance. Bye the way, this resonates well with my own philosophy of how change should take place. What's more, Dr. Heetun and me are similarly minded in that we do not wish to change from Capitalism to another system. Surely we see Capitalism as being broke and needing repair. It's history in just the past seventy years has created a Great Depression and a Great Recession. Talk about suffering! The process seemingly goes off track whenever there is not a sizeable enough moderating element to counter the power of the wealthy elite. Dr. Heetun's aim is for FirstRateCrowd is to become this moderating element. When established on a permanent basis, and with sufficient force, it will continually counter the power of the 1%.