Breaking the Tyranny of Price - A NED Design Proposition
November 21st, 2005
Small Is Good World marketplaces must break the bonds of tight-coupling between price and product.
We referenced The Nanocorp Primer article, The Yin Yang of eCommerce Engines, in a prior post. One of the tables in this article encapsulates much of the content on this article:
| Feature | Big is Good Agora | Small is Good Agora |
|---|---|---|
| Main theme | Dynamic pricing | Dynamic storytelling |
| Value proposition | Liquidity - convert goods into desirable price | Meaning - wrap goods/services with imaginative stories |
| Customer role | Market player | Coauthor storyteller and character |
| Knowledge focus | Timing - Market Intelligence | Trust - Community Building |
| Key process | Price discovery | Story discovery |
| Examples | eBay - Yahoo! classifieds - Priceline | MicroAid.net(now) Squirrelfeeders.com and NED (to be) |
An agora marketplace is a socioeconomic network that brings buyers and sellers together.
We are on this web site creatively collaborating on strategies to change the world largely due to the deep insight that the Omidyars had that resulted in their creation of eBay, the premiere example of an Internet-enabled agora marketplace.
Many believe that the very nature of an agora marketplace disintermediates the supply chain to drive relentlessly toward an optimum (low) price.
If this is the case, then NED and any other Small Is Good World marketplace is doomed.
Fortunately — and this is the message in the above table and, more fully, the article from which it is extracted — price does not have to be the ultimate driver of markets.
Big Is Good World and Small Is Good World
In order to understand our options, we have to take into account the profound fundamental differences that underlie the two constellations of organizing principles that shape our frames of reference of business and its marketplaces. These two basic strategies for organization are a classic yin-yang opposition: Big Is Good World and Small Is Good World.
A Small Is Good World marketplace intermediates to grow the supply/value chain with world- and life-changing impact points. Yes, transparency is essential to allow consumers to see and appreciate these impact points. But transparency is not enough.
The consumer has to be able to interactively compose this chain of impact points if we are ever going to break the ruthless association of price to product. Products have to become like poker chips; essential to ‘the game’ but not its focus.
The experience of Small Is Good World shopping and the psychological reward of being part of a Small Is Good World socioeconomic network have to be compelling and need-fulfilling. These experience-based attributes of the marketplace have to be so powerful that the sum transacted during a purchase is only loosely coupled with the commodity value of the product purchased.
Many people believe that this design goal for the Small Is Good World marketplace is an unattainable fantasy. Many believe our Smithian market behavior is a hardwired, price-driven imperative that is little different than that of rats’ pursuit of cheese in a maze.
What a sad, uncreative and human nature deadening presumption. There is so much ill-founded common sense about what works in business because we have been locked into a One Right Way of doing things for too long.
A Call to Arms… Legs… Minds
NED, as an example of the emerging Small Is Good World, is a call to arms to “Say it ain’t so!”
NED, which we might liken to the ‘Next eBay’, will be a multi-billion dollar enterprise. But this Next Big Thing, paradoxically, will be found in the Small Is Good World. And its form is much more likely to be an entrepreneurial community ecosystem rather than a corporation. This is why Mark naturally gravitated toward a franchise model for NED. But even the fanchise model is likely to be only a piece of this diverse network ecosystem.
To make the Small Is Good World real we will have to suspend disbelief so we can articulate and pursue business and marketplace design goals that seem hard to imagine in today’s world. NED is an ideal vision around which to collectively imagine this exciting new world and its alternative marketplaces… to imagine, and then to make it real.
–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–
Entry Filed under: Entrepreneurial Community Ecosystems, Inprosumerism, NED - Philanthropic Franchise, Post-Autistic Economics
Breaking the Tyranny of Price - A NED Design Proposition
November 21st, 2005
Small Is Good World marketplaces must break the bonds of tight-coupling between price and product.
We referenced The Nanocorp Primer article, The Yin Yang of eCommerce Engines, in a prior post. One of the tables in this article encapsulates much of the content on this article:
| Feature | Big is Good Agora | Small is Good Agora |
|---|---|---|
| Main theme | Dynamic pricing | Dynamic storytelling |
| Value proposition | Liquidity - convert goods into desirable price | Meaning - wrap goods/services with imaginative stories |
| Customer role | Market player | Coauthor storyteller and character |
| Knowledge focus | Timing - Market Intelligence | Trust - Community Building |
| Key process | Price discovery | Story discovery |
| Examples | eBay - Yahoo! classifieds - Priceline | MicroAid.net(now) Squirrelfeeders.com and NED (to be) |
An agora marketplace is a socioeconomic network that brings buyers and sellers together.
We are on this web site creatively collaborating on strategies to change the world largely due to the deep insight that the Omidyars had that resulted in their creation of eBay, the premiere example of an Internet-enabled agora marketplace.
Many believe that the very nature of an agora marketplace disintermediates the supply chain to drive relentlessly toward an optimum (low) price.
If this is the case, then NED and any other Small Is Good World marketplace is doomed.
Fortunately — and this is the message in the above table and, more fully, the article from which it is extracted — price does not have to be the ultimate driver of markets.
Big Is Good World and Small Is Good World
In order to understand our options, we have to take into account the profound fundamental differences that underlie the two constellations of organizing principles that shape our frames of reference of business and its marketplaces. These two basic strategies for organization are a classic yin-yang opposition: Big Is Good World and Small Is Good World.
A Small Is Good World marketplace intermediates to grow the supply/value chain with world- and life-changing impact points. Yes, transparency is essential to allow consumers to see and appreciate these impact points. But transparency is not enough.
The consumer has to be able to interactively compose this chain of impact points if we are ever going to break the ruthless association of price to product. Products have to become like poker chips; essential to ‘the game’ but not its focus.
The experience of Small Is Good World shopping and the psychological reward of being part of a Small Is Good World socioeconomic network have to be compelling and need-fulfilling. These experience-based attributes of the marketplace have to be so powerful that the sum transacted during a purchase is only loosely coupled with the commodity value of the product purchased.
Many people believe that this design goal for the Small Is Good World marketplace is an unattainable fantasy. Many believe our Smithian market behavior is a hardwired, price-driven imperative that is little different than that of rats’ pursuit of cheese in a maze.
What a sad, uncreative and human nature deadening presumption. There is so much ill-founded common sense about what works in business because we have been locked into a One Right Way of doing things for too long.
A Call to Arms… Legs… Minds
NED, as an example of the emerging Small Is Good World, is a call to arms to “Say it ain’t so!”
NED, which we might liken to the ‘Next eBay’, will be a multi-billion dollar enterprise. But this Next Big Thing, paradoxically, will be found in the Small Is Good World. And its form is much more likely to be an entrepreneurial community ecosystem rather than a corporation. This is why Mark naturally gravitated toward a franchise model for NED. But even the fanchise model is likely to be only a piece of this diverse network ecosystem.
To make the Small Is Good World real we will have to suspend disbelief so we can articulate and pursue business and marketplace design goals that seem hard to imagine in today’s world. NED is an ideal vision around which to collectively imagine this exciting new world and its alternative marketplaces… to imagine, and then to make it real.
–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–
Entry Filed under: Entrepreneurial Community Ecosystems, Inprosumerism, NED - Philanthropic Franchise, Post-Autistic Economics
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