Our Collaborative Economy

from P2P Foundation.net 2012 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz

Summary of the Book Report.
Two main agents of transformation guide this work. 1) the emergence of “community dynamics” as an essential ingredient of doing business. It is no longer a matter of autonomous & separated corporations marketing to – essentially – isolated consumers, it is now a matter of deeply inter-networked economic actors involved in vocal & productive communities.
2) the combined effect of digital reproduction and the increasingly ‘socialized’ production of value, makes the individual & corporate privatization of ‘intellectual’ property if not untenable, then certainly more difficult , and in all likelihood, ultimately unproductive. Hence the combined development of community-oriented and ‘open’ business models, which rely on more ‘social’ forms of intellectual property.

In this work, we therefore look at Community Dynamics that are mobilized by traditional actors (open innovation, crowd-sourcing), and new models where the community’s value creation is at its core (the free software, shared design & open hardware models). We then look at monetization in the absence of private IP. Linked to these developments are the emergence of distributed physical infra-structures, where the evolution of the networked computer is mirrored in the development of networked production and even financing. Indeed, the mutualization of knowledge goes hand in hand with the mutualization of physical infra-structures, such as collaborative consumption and peer to peer [P2P] marketplaces, used to mobilize idle resources & assets more effectively.”

CONTENTS of the BOOK.

Chapter 1: creates a frame of understanding with some general characteristics of the whole field. In order to do this, it attempts to create a general grammar to ease the understanding of the varied phenomena that will be discussed in the rest of the report. It tries to uncover the fundamental drives and explains the basic inter-connected concepts. It ends with a first approach to a categorization of the different expressions of the collaborative economy.

Chapter 2: looks at user innovation dynamics, and describes how the corporate world has answered their challenge. We examine the emerging figures of the more active ‘user’ which replaces the traditional figure of the consumer, and sociological categories such as the professional amateur and the lead user. The chapter describes how corporations have adapted by initializing open innovation and by integrating practices for co-design & co-creation of value in their own value chains. We also look at the more independent user-generated media practices, which have been facilitated with the emergence of social media.

( Continued in Ch 3 the new ‘diagonal’ or ‘hybrid’ approaches, Ch 4 community-centric production, Ch 5 infratructural of distributed production, Ch 6 ‘open’ & community-based business & monetization models – in Premium Content )