Just a few weeks ago, Mary Meeker – KPCB partners – has released its now classic and much-anticipated presentation on the state of the Internet. Besides the usual and recurring data on the penetration of network access, ubiquity of smartphones and the technological megatrend, the presentation of this year had a significant focus on the key issue of the so-called “on-demand” economy.
The point of view of Meeker maybe we can finally help overcome the impasse, we live for many months now, to describe this emerging economic model: they are often the same ones that define this as “sharing economy” that then squabbling in endless debates on the “sharing” is a service rather another and how mining is this new form of “capitalism platforms”.
1. NETWORK AND ‘ENTRY IN OUR LIVES AND TURNS EVERYTHING AND’ improved
In the presentation of Meeker – but basically in any analysis worthy of the name has appeared online in recent months – are outlined two key aspects of this transformation: one is the transformation of the application, the other the transformation of work and the labor supply.
From the point of view of the application the opportunity is quite clear: the pervasiveness of the network mobility and access in the world has no more room to bad experiences and there is a universe of services to be improved, made more accessible, more smart, more efficient and effective – both from a general point of view that purely economic – and This is happening with force.
disruptor digital identify niches of inefficiency , They understand the value, we redesign the user experiences (seen today as potential producers) and, in most industries, come to grow so fast and so much to redefine the standard.
He did it in the travel and hospitality Airbnb, Uber in urban transport but also with the labor market UpWork freelance in the knowledge economy.
2. I HAVE MARKETPLACE REINVENTED ECONOMY AMONG CITIZENS AND COMPANIES
The interesting news of the moment, than in the past, is that often – in almost all the occasions where actually there is a subversion of the old models and growth Exponential – the new actors that redefine the product / service and with it the experience they do by using the weapon of the marketplace. As we have seen in the past here on CheFuturo !, this is the era of “network orchestrators” : brands and companies that are able to identify what needs and what skills are in society and to design enabling platforms where these abilities and needs can be effectively connected, through appropriate channels, and where important trade flows of value are generated by the interaction between peers (citizens manufacturers), the platform and the partners and companies (by reference to a model used to design these platforms can look to the Platform Design Toolkit).
In effect what we are witnessing is the “marketing” of a series of social interactions between individuals: and it is here that often generates ‘misunderstanding of not-quite-sharing-for-my-tastes.
Some people have this belief that distribute, in society, a process of consumption and production of value that has so far been centralized and industrialized is almost sacrilegious: how many times have we heard someone say, “but this is not sharing! It is only after the sale of services “.
What is missing is, therefore, perhaps, a simple power of awareness: the marketplace is demonstrated today the most powerful tool of social organization around the needs and capabilities; it exceeds momentum, in the era of killing radical transaction costs, the industrial approach of linear ‘”I (company) I produce (consumer) consumption”.
3. THE CITIZENS MANUFACTURER monetizes TIME, ABILITY ‘AND RESOURCES
It was mostly thanks to the discovery of the relationship between the nature of the company and the cost of the transaction (which could be defined as the total cost related to the organization of a task) that Ronald Coase , received a belated Nobel Prize for Economics in 1991. The 1937 article offered first a economic explanation of why individuals choose to form businesses and organizations rather than relate bilaterally (peer) on a market. During the industrial age bureaucracies are thus served to organize more effectively the needs and capacity of a company in which the transaction cost was quite high. A few weeks ago Geoffrey Moore (famous author of “Crossing the Chasm” , the bible of marketing semi-traditional) examining the work of Coase and updating it has reflected directly on the profound transformations that the digital economy is having on the structure of the company.
According to Moore, the transition to the post-industrial perspective (that of a company that acts as an orchestrator of resources rather than producing them) effect not only on business models, with the birth precisely-Demand economy, but on the nature of the company. The need to interact and collaborate with partners and citizens manufacturer proves to be deeply destructive to the hierarchical structures and bureaucratic that provided the main motivation for the existence of a whole class of middle-managers, for most of the twentieth century.
The move bureaucracies business empires is digital, according to Greg Satell, so important that he calls the platforms as the “bureaucracies interconnected age”.
Of course, the challenges that this new (and successful) strategy of organizing production features are numerous and go beyond even the complex issue of the cancellation of an incredible amount of work. In the first instance these platforms are enabling a transformation in who “consumes” the experience goes to the on-demand and the “self fulfillment” – finally to the dangerous narcissism of those who can have it all in hand. As it inevitably, the impact of digital platforms is even higher in transforming the experience of those who produce.
He says therefore the figure of the “national producer” – creator of independent value, that monetizes its time, its capabilities and its resources – and that, as well as Meeker explained in the following figure, acts synergistically with the innovators and creators of digital platforms and pushes society forward in experimenting, creating friction with the actors’ institutional “(regulators and incumbents).
Who is this citizen manufacturer? A recent and comprehensive post on “The Atlantic” a few days ago it paints a bleak but not without interesting and concludes that “the economy on demand is quite demanding of his employees: they are attracted by the flexibility, but then They find themselves trying to align their days working with peak demand (which does not always correspond to a typical working day) “and also known as” this flexibility could become even more illusory when platforms [...] will start to feel the pressure from investors and venture capitalists not only to grow but to become more profitable. “
4. THERE ‘A NEW CATEGORY OF WORKERS DIGITAL FOUGHT BUT THAT IS NOT REGULATED
Despite the debate on these issues, those of the transformation of work, both in Italy only in its infancy, it is alive in all the world: only a few days ago, in what seems only a first installment of a clash between the lobby, the Committee on the work of California came to say that drivers of “Uber” are used and not contract workers.
In a condivisibilissimo piece of Re / Code a few days ago, Marina Gorbis frames in my opinion very well the issue and says that if it is true that we must ensure that this new category of workers enjoy fair wages and welfare benefits is important that these same benefits are adapted to the new reality of work. According Gorbis this new reality: “will be different, and instead of applying old rules, we need to understand [...] the internal logic of the new platforms and labor economics that characterize the design elements that can maximize their positive aspects and the full range of challenges and opportunities that they represent. “
And yet that” now is the time to intensify the largest design activities that the world has ever undertaken : Rethinking the future of the work itself from the point of view of the people working. “
5. WINS THE DIGITAL MARKET WHY ‘ARE IN CRISIS INSTITUTIONS
in attending to this enormous challenge, our institutions, bureaucratic and think in a different era, stalled. The crisis and the confrontation with the regulator (in place more or less strongly in all countries where these new platforms and marketplaces emerge with strength) is mainly due to the disintermediation of the regulation: these systems are born marketplaces bringing in systems of self-regulation that are often complex to understand from the point of view of institutional actors who end up becoming irrelevant in the ecosystem.
However, the often considerable impression that, beyond the work-related problems, these platforms produce reality (the effects of gentrificanti Airbnb use of urban infrastructure that makes Uber) justify a need for a fair regulation in the interest of the common that can not be dismissed.
In the past I happened to dwell on theme “third digital age”: today we live a digital environment that enables brands and businesses to collect a significant amount of data and information and to build, on the basis of these, a recommendation system, configurations and anticipation of the needs that will allow users to use the services as efficiently as possible and that will lead them to achieve their goals “through the brand” and through the empowerment that the same is able to put in place towards the users.
In a similar way to what happens with respect to the relationship with brands and companies, these “citizens manufacturers” expect, therefore, the ability of the institutions to anticipate the need for regulation and to implement them at the right time with the aim of improving their experience – precisely of citizens (more) producers – under the new possibilities offered by the digital economy interconnected.
6. CHANGING PERSPECTIVE TO MAKE THE “DIGITAL RENAISSANCE”
In a recent paper “Regulation the Internet way”, Nick Grossman said (as it often does, very well) the context and change perspective that the emergence of these new digital platforms requires anyone involved in policy making. While the approach to regulation 1.0 – what our administrative institutions Fordist are accustomed to use – you rely on second Grossman ” get our permission and then do “, in regulation 2.0 the point of view is totally different and is based on a more permissive “innovates as well, we will track the way you act and, if you behave badly, your reputation will be impacted.”
The point is, therefore, pass from a substantially closed to the news, with a regulation based on giving “permission in advance”, in an open system where regulation is based on the analysis of data to back, and Research on the impacts and, in a sense, “data-driven” guided and justified by the experience and by learning. Grossman himself but warns of the complexity of the search for this synthesis: on the one hand with the platforms jealous of their data, and other bureaucratic institutions jealous of control.
We are, therefore, in a historical moment in which (as he says Greg Satell in a beautiful piece called “The revolution will not be centralized”) the crisis of the digital economy, rather than being an individual crisis, a crisis “the institutional purpose.”
This crisis is therefore the crisis that we live every day to imagine and put into practice, politically, a new model of production-and-welfare, a model suited to the digital age , which finally removes the brakes of what will be a true digital renaissance.
SIMONE CICERO
Rome, June 25, 2015
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