Fantastic insights on the inspiring future of crowd business models

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I have just had my mind blown.

I have got off a call with three of the speakers in the Future of Crowd Business Models session at Crowd Business Models Summit, which will be held in San Francisco on October 22, the day before the major crowdsourcing conference CrowdConf.

What I heard from the speakers on what they will cover and the conversation we had was amazing. This is going to be an awesome session.

I can’t do justice to their ideas in a blog post, but here are a few notes from the conversation.

BYRON REESE is EVP of Innovation at Demand Media, having joined the company when his company PageWise, including its subsidiary Expert Village, was acquired by Demand Media.
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How divergence in labor productivity is shaping the future of work

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My recently launched Future of Work framework provides a highly summarized overview of the future of work. Over coming months I will delve into specific aspects of the framework.

One of the most important issues is divergence in labor productivity, mentioned as the fourth point under Labor Productivity in the Economic Structure section.

Across industries as well as countries, the productivity of labor is diverging dramatically, creating job opportunities in some sectors and constraining them in others. There are many broader issues in shifts in labor productivity that I’ll come back to another time. For now, it’s worth looking at these two charts.


Source: Andrew McAfee
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Value polarization and transcending job commoditization: Expertise, Relationships, Innovation

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Yesterday I released a first version of my Future of Work framework.

I think that a detailed explanation of the outline framework would be a very useful complement to the visual landscape, and I aim to provide that over coming months in a series of blog posts, videos, and other content.


Click on the image to download the full framework.

Today, I thought I would look at the ‘Value Polarization‘ section under Economic Structure.
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Launching new framework: The Future of Work

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I have been working with one of the world’s largest private companies, which is engaged in a strategy project looking at the future out to 2025. Today a key workshop for the project was run, where we refined the project process and I provided some perspectives on the future of work as input to the study.

While the future of work and organizations is one of my most important themes, I haven’t had any public summary documents on the topic. For today’s workshop and also as a first step in building out some richer frameworks, I created an overview framework on the future of work.

The framework probably needs some explanation, and I intend to both refine and provide more detailed explanations of the framework in the near future. In the meantime, here is our Beta v1 of The Future of Work framework.


Click on the image to download the full framework.

I’d love to hear any thoughts or input you have.

Global distributed organizations can attract the most talented in the world

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Forbes has a nice story about the history of WordPress and the role the open-source software plays in the for-profit business Automattic. The article at one point says:

Automattic has an idiosyncratic workplace. As a legacy of its open-source roots its 120 employees are spread across 26 countries and six continents. Although most work alone at home, each team–usually made up of five or six people–has a generous budget to travel. “All of the money we save on office space, we blow on travel costs,” Mullenweg laughs. Groups have gathered in Hawaii, Mexico and New Zealand. Once a year everyone meets for a week at an accessible destination with a solid Internet connection. A distributed workforce means Automattic can hire talent from around the world–without having to offer the perks and pay of Google, Facebook and Apple.

This brought a response from Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg:
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Creating a Return on Investment (ROI) calculation for Enterprise 2.0 and internal social media

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A major challenge for organizations that are considering internal social media initiatives is that a business case including a financial justification is frequently required.

To be frank, I think ROI calculations for social initiatives are in most cases a waste of time, because so many of the benefits and costs are unknowable before the initiative. A leap of faith is required, after which calculations using real data can be done to help refine strategies.

However if the organization requires a financial case, then those seeing the opportunity need to do what they can to create the case.

Chapter 16 of my report Implementing Enterprise 2.0 is on Building a Business Case. One of the resources I provide in the chapter is a table to help make ROI calculations. All that is required is to put numbers against each of the value and cost items in the table below, where appropriate using a back-of-the-envelope calculation to support them. Not all of the items will be relevant, and you may find other items that are applicable, but it provides a good starting point to generating numbers that can be used in an ROI.
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Disruptive innovation in professional services: the value in expertise

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The concept of disruptive innovation is now well-recognized in business. It was originally described by Clayton Christensen almost exclusively in terms of products – often technology-based – such as storage devices.

Disruptive innovation can happen in any industry, however it can need translation and interpretation for other domains such as services.

I recently I ran a presentation and interactive workshop on the future of professional services to kick off a law firm partner strategy offsite. Among the more specific challenges, opportunities, and responses that the professions face, I ran through some of the core principles that could disrupt their industry.

In fact a broad range of expertise-based industries are being subject to disruption, however with quite different dynamics than in product industries. The 3 key drivers of disruption of expertise are remote work, process automation, and artificial intelligence.

Four expertise-based services industries that are being disrupted are:
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Prediction: Video-conferencing will help drive increased business travel

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Yesterday I gave the opening keynote at Global Business Travel Association Australia/NZ’s annual conference, on The Future of the Global Economy: The Opportunities.

My keynote focused on the major economic, technological, and social shifts under way and how they impact business travel and how it is managed in organizations.

Clearly a particularly pointed issue in the world of business travel today is the rise of video-conferencing, which many companies in recent years have latched onto as a substitute for travel, largely for cost-saving.
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Launch of We’re Looking For Talent – the foundation of a crowd business model

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We have just launched our new recruitment site We’re Looking For Talent.

Crowd business models are a major theme for us in our publishing and events. They are also at the heart of the AHT Group business model. As we build our businesses we want to see how far we can take the use of distributed work.

We currently tap work and talent on a wide variety of crowdsourcing sites, but we have reached the stage of creating our own platform in finding the best people to work with.

The principles for how we seek to attract talent are described in detail on the page Why Work For Us?, which is the best place to read about what we are doing, however I’ve provided a brief summary below.
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The Guardian: Why nations need intelligent, differentiated strategies for investing in broadband

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Last week The Guardian asked me to write an article from a futurist’s perspective commenting on the debate on Britain’s internet priorities. They published it under the title For better internet connectivity, we must invest in bandwidth.

Below is the full text of the article. I will write more on this topic later, as it is so critical for nations to take intelligent, differentiated, relevant strategies to broadband investment in order to create prosperous economies and societies.

For better internet connectivity, we must invest in bandwidth

In a digital world, high download speeds are less important than capacity – those who remain offline risk further isolation

Our future will be connected. Humanity is in the process of transitioning into a world in which we can be better understood as a richly connected collective than a set of individuals. Connectivity will drive our prosperity, both economic and social.
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