i.want.world

Built for Evolution: The Organizational Structure of Platforms

Capability building is now the most important consideration when making decisions as to how any organization should be structured. This is particularly true for platform companies.

Why? The answer has to do with how platform companies create value when compared to product counterparts. Product companies create value primarily by making their products incrementally better. Take the iPod, for instance: it started as a simple mp3 player, and then made incremental improvements to its appearance, its size, its storage capabilities, and its media display functionality. It will most likely continue on this trajectory, making sustaining innovations, or incremental improvements, to its existing product line.

Now contrast this with a platform company like Google. Google relies on incremental innovations to a certain extent — its algorithm is periodically altered in an attempt to improve search results, and Gmail seems to be forever expanding its storage capacity. More important to Google from a competitive standpoint, though, is it's ability to create entirely new capabilities — for instance, Google Video and Google Base. These initiatives required a wide array of new capabilities to be established.

To structure a company for new capabilities as opposed to incremental innovations, the value chain must completely atomized. In other words, there can be no long value chains where each employee is a rung in a ladder, with all the value ultimately flowing to the top. Such hierarchical organizations are essentially immobile by design; they are not capable of creating new capabilities because everyone in the vertical hierarchy is participating in a way that only serves the existing value chain. This is great for incremental innovations, as such a structure essentially institutionalizes the process of adding more value to existing value chains. It is not so effective, though, for creating new value chains.

At this point, Google is the poster child for the platform company, with its bottom-up innovation style and its emphasis on group-oriented decision making and individual creativity. By giving its employees freedom to work on their own projects, it has set the stage for many value chains to be created; in other words, it has put in place an engine for building capabilities. As companies embrace platform business models to a greater extent, this strategy will be taken even further, with organizations being structured in much the way that open source communities are: no real bosses and independent members working in a decentralized environment dictated more by coordination than by hierarchies.

The final article in the series will look at the seismic consequences of this shift in organizations, and how it will ultimately bring about the demise of corporations and nations.

via Kid Mercury's Blog by Kid Mercury on 05/16/07

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the Economist on buying local

 via International Economic Law and Policy Blog by Simon Lester on 8/7/09

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climate: the limits of public concern

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stalk your clothes from seed to sold with Made-By track & trace

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will you pay $195 for an organic cotton tee?

Photo credit: Gucci Gucci, Alexander McQueen, Sergio Rossi, Bottega Veneta, and Yves Saint Laurent are going green, according to Vanity Fair—well, sorta. Call it a case of "brand synergy;" the Gucci Group fashion houses are presenting their high-end interpretations of sustainable style, if only to promote Yann Arthus-Betrand's epic cinematic outing about the state of the planet, which happens to be sponsored by the brands' parent company, PPR.

Home, which expands upon the aerial-photographer-turned-filmaker's groundbreaking "Earth from Above" photo project, will premier on World Environmental Day on June 5—in 14 languages and in over 87 countries—across every conceivable medium simultaneously: movie theaters, television, the Internet, and on DVD, as well as at several public-viewing forums in New York, Paris, London, and Boston, including Stella McCartney's store in West Hollywood.

To mark this ambitious event, the crown jewels of PPR's fashion pantheon will be releasing limited-edition, eco-friendly goods that will benefit GoodPlanet.org, an environmental charity that Arthus-Betrand founded four years ago.

Frida Giannini, Gucci's creative director, flexed his design muscle with a $195 organic cotton T-shirt, branded with both Gucci and Home's logos in front and listing the 54 countries covered by the film on the back. Alexander McQueen has unveiled a $285 organic cotton scarf featuring a dying earth morphed into a skull, while Sergio Rossi will be introducing a stiletto shoe dubbed the "Eco Pump," made from liquid wood and vegetable-tanned leather.

At Bottega Veneta, customers who spend more than $1,500 at the label's Paris, Milan, and New York stores will receive an exclusive tote, and Yves Saint Laurent devotees can expect to see co-branded T-shirts, tanks, and bags in organic cotton.

via TreeHugger on 5/26/09

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i am the long tail

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saving the world

Found a quote today which undoubtedly resonates with Ecologisca..

"Today's entrepreneurs routinely apply business techniques to philanthropy. Some of them are even using a venture-capital model, investing in a range of promising start-ups and making longer-term funding conditional on performance... [they] often blur the distinction between making money and offering charity. Some use the profits from their main business to cross-subsidise their charitable work."

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the UK post office's new model comes quite close to ecologisca's

Matter is a box full of nice things delivered to you on a Saturday morning. Inside the box is a selection of items from different companies-which might be useful, entertaining or just fun.

The Royal Mail is sending out a box of free stuff which it called "Matter". Last time it contained DVDs, candybars, a SIM card CDs and a few other goodies, of which first batch was sent out in December to about 30,000 people.

They are describing it as "a new approach to direct mail" where you try the free goodies, maybe give some to your friends and eventually stay as a loyal customer. No brainer.

Ecologisca's proposal of eradicating advertisers' blanketing the largest market audience possible with a given campaign follows a similar business model. Its concept of democratizing its consumers for the benefit of being able to ultimately sell anything at no charge would rather draw upon the "customers implicit and explicit connections for efficient ad targeting augmentation and relevancy."

In effect, it would even be more efficient than the Royal Mail's customers' task of having to intentionally sign up for "Matter."

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wasting energy

Moore's Law has liberated us from the thought of treating computer transistors as a scarce item, ultimately allowing us to reach a point of where we "waste computation power". Consequently, the creation of the graphical user interface and the computing environment we know today are essentially a waste of computing resources.

Can we waste energy just as we are wasting "computation power"?

Yes, once it is abundant and/or treat it as such.

Clean renewable energy is by nature free (perpetually naturally replenished). Its democratization, upon depletion of our current primary source of energy, will ultimately lead to renewable energy's widespread adaptation and quicker innovations. Thus it has become the core goal of our firm to partake in the fulfillment of this revolutionary and innovative concept of free mass-distribution.

Related articles:

• Understanding Moore's Law

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help ecologisca create a solution

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