Posts filed under 'NED - Philanthropic Franchise'
A while back we contributed a post that juxtaposed shopping as it is with shopping as it can be. Some folks liked the idea, others wrestled with what shopping as it can be might be like.
Break these Chains
To get to shopping as it can be we have to expand the context of consumption. Being a consumer is not just about being a bottomless pit that sucks more and more stuff into it. For many of us, being a consumer is about being the final link in a chain, a supply chain, that extracts materials from the earth, transforms these materials into useful products that we then buy and use.
In the Big Is Good World, where insatiable consumption is a requirement for market sustainability, the chain is a straight line from raw material extractor, through producer to consumer.
As the Industrial Age gave way to the Information Age, there was the start of a paradigm shift that is reflected by futurist Alvin Tofler’s coining the term prosumer [more at Wikipedia], a concatenation of the words producer and consumer. Tofler and others were exploring the potential for consumers to take a more active role in the form and substance of these supply chains that satisfy our needs. As recently as the Cluetrain Manifesto we’ve been told that we can expect to be more satisfied consumers to the extent that we are invited into the conversation that shapes what is produced for our consumption.
Still, there is something missing. As Peggy Lee asked, “Is that all there is?” [Lyrics to the most depressing hit song ever and about Nihilism].
Enter the Inprosumer
But a chain can link back onto itself to form a circle, the supply chain becomes a cycle. We take a step beyond prosumer to inprosumer — investor, producer, consumer.
There will be many ways that we can tap into the dynamics of stories and games to empower new forms of shopping as it can be. But here are a few ideas we’ve had along these lines… ideas that could help to shape the NED community and its associated shopping experience (both on-line and in-store).
For rich folks, exclusivity has often been a sought-after feature of a product. Exclusivity in this context is closely related to limited supply and high price. But what if product exclusivity was instead a matter of foresight, risk-sharing, and creativity!?
Under shopping as it is, you might get the thrill of owning a limited edition sweater by going to an exclusive high fashion store and paying an extraordinary amount of money for something that only a very few people can afford.
On the other hand, you might get an equally exclusive sweater by shopping as it can be at NED. Instead of needing a giant pile of cash, at NED you need foresight and creativity.
First, you’d want to invest in two or three sheep in a shepherd’s herd in southwest New Mexico or maybe West Africa. Planning ahead for your share of the Spring shearing, you’ll want to have invested in some Loom Time Futures for sale by a talented Weaver’s co-op or guild such as Tapetes de Lana.
Even after you have that one-of-a-kind sweater made from the wool of your own sheep, woven by your favorite weaver, you still have a few pounds left over. So you take your excess wool, along with your quarterly share of lumber from your investment in a sustainable forestry venture in Maine, along with any excess Craft Production Time Futures you have accumulated from other activities you are invested in, and you go searching around the story-driven, game-oriented NED marketplace.
You search finds that there are three community development fundraising campaigns going on that you’d like to support. So you negotiate the contribution of your raw materials and production capacity, and come to terms on your expected return on investment if any.
Some time passes and you’d like to add a goat to your herd-share. Rather than pay for it outright, you do some marketing work and land a nice order for the herd’s pooled surplus wool.
Over the five years that you have been a NED Inprosumer, you have racked up quite an Impact Quotient. When you log onto the NED community web site, your User Profile makes your world-changing impact very clear. You’ve had a hand in drilling dozens of wells in villages in Africa. You own a nice chunk of Loom Time Futures in a famous Weavers Co-op in New Mexico. You know the potter who made your dishes, and the chandler who makes your candles. You don’t just know who these talented people are, you know them as fellow entrepreneurial activists as you’ve shared risk and reward with them on dozens of community and personal development projects.
A Game of Inches
Does this mean the end to shopping as it is? Not at all. Shopping as it can be isn’t a replacement to traditional markets. It is a moderator of the excesses of unbridled consumption.
Imagine the total impact on the planet if we were to shift just a few percentage points of consumption from shopping as it is into shopping as it can be. This shift will get more and more of us to broaden our perspective, to see consumption in terms of the people impacted rather than the stuff produced.
–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–
December 6th, 2005
John Berger said:
Jim and Timlynn, your post is fascinating. I love and agree with your deathtrap 1 ?? you have said it way more concisely than I ever could have. I can??t understand deathtrap 2, but my failure is because I don??t understand what the alternative could be…
Personally, I don??t think I have ever purchased something online because I was ??engaged?…
I am falling into the trap here of assuming my shopping patterns are typical, but I think you would agree that most retailers, even the successful online ones, think the same way…
Hey John and Mark,
Aha! John, your last post shows that you are trying but struggling as you enter the ‘zone’ where you can suspend disbelief and think about ’shopping’ that is not shopping. Congratulations! This struggle is a necessary first step toward envisioning breakthrough innovations necessary for NED’s success. (”Grasshopper,” as David Carradine’s elder would tell him in an old King Fu episode,”Your strength is your weakness, your weakness is your strength.”)
What you described in your ‘use case’ about how/why you shop is a great example of shopping as we know it. Essentially all on-line and real world shopping environments and business models known to date were envisioned and designed with the assumption that the most central element of shopping is finding and acquiring some thing, some stuff, some product that you want and need.
Forget that. For most of us in non-marginalized, non-impoverished circumstances, we probably have nearly all the stuff we need. Sure, there are consumables that we have to shop for repeatedly (food, toilet paper, etc.). And sometimes we have excess capital and want to treat ourselves to a new something or other that will enhance our personal life. For these things, we shop — as in the shopping as we know it way. Price, quality, and service all still, and will, matter.
And yet, while we keep acquiring the stuff that the marketeers tell us we need to be happy, cool, accepted, envied, whatever, there is still a sucking black hole in our lives that says, “Is that all there is? Is this the sum and substance of my life?”
It is shopping as it can be that will speak to and address this void/need/drive in our lives. Imagine a shopping (consumer) experience where the product is incidental to the experience, where the experience/participation itself has intrinsic, fulfilling value. Where the product is the prize in the Cracker Jack box.
Sure, as Mark says in terms of the ’shopper bandwidth’ analogy, NED has to appeal to and serve the ‘thing/product need’ of those who engage in shopping as we know it. But it will be our envisioning and working to explore and create shopping as it can be that will trigger the network effect that puts NED’s impact into the marketing history books.
It is interesting, but understandable. Over the years that we have been exploring these ideas, it is those with the most knowledge and experience in marketing (the strategists of shopping as we know it) who have the hardest time suspending disbelief and imagining shopping as it can be. Yet, once these folks break that tyranny of certainty about know how things are and always will be, we believe these folks will be among our most valuable envisioneers leading the charge to create shoping as it can be.
“Grasshopper, your strength is your weakness. Your weakness is your strength.”
–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–
December 1st, 2005
We will respond to the interesting points raised in intervening posts, but first we wanted to get part two of our comments out in response to the flurry of posts about bricks and mortar and the challenges of doing on-line retailing.
Do not presume that the myriad of well-funded, well-meaning but failed social purpose business models on the Internet mean that there is not an opportunity for breakthrough innovation on the order of a ‘next eBay‘. It has long been our contention that social purpose eCommerce strategies to date have been woefully uninspired and built on two Deathtrap Presumptions:
- Deathtrap Presumption 1: Wrapping a product purchase with a benevolent, feel-good social purpose story will tap some latent, socially responsible drive/need in consumers that will create brand preference and loyalty.
- Deathtrap Presumption 2: Alternative marketplaces can be built using conventional eCommerce ’shopping cart’ software.
The failed on-line social purpose businesses mentioned in prior posts believed too strongly in the myth of the first Deathtrap Presumption. This led them to fall prey to the second Deathtrap Presumption as they expected that they could deliver an engaging on-line shopping experience using existing eCommerce software platforms.
Innovative alternative markets will not just happen. They will be the result of an aggressive, strategic, applied research and development initiative to create a software platform that delivers a compelling, interactive, fun, and need-fulfilling consumer experience.
These breakthrough innovations in market definition and consumer purchase decision dynamics will make NED products purchased necessary, but paradoxically marginalized, within the shopping experience as poker chips are necessary, but not central, to poker.
–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–
December 1st, 2005
John, Luke, and Mark,
We’ll reply in two parts. In this post we address our concern about too tight a focus on bricks and mortar storefronts. In a second post we’ll address the apprehensions folks have about the challenges of doing NED On-line.
We are not saying that there is no place for bricks and mortar in the NED vision. Rather, physical storefronts need to be a supplemental embodiment of the NED vision rather than its necessary foundation.
We think there is essentially agreement that NED needs to be realized in both bricks and mortar storefronts and as an on-line marketplace/community. We do, however, want to take a moment to make it clear why we want to be sure that the NED vision is not too dependent on a physical storefront strategy.
Although we risk being wrong by presumption as we don’t have explicit knowledge of each of your personal circumstances, it sounds like a number of folks contributing to this thread live in metropolitan areas where physical shopping is readily accessible and full of choices. This is simply not the daily reality for a vast number of folks in the world outside these metro areas.
We spent the last two years in remote northcentral Montana, and last year we relocated to Fairfield, a small (but unusually creative and active) town of less than 10,000 people in rural southeast Iowa. We have a Walmart on the edge of town, and a couple of chain supermarkets. But other than that it’s local merchants that meet our needs. It’s a one or two hour trip to an urban area to get anything close to a major mall, or to find a selection of the retail chain stores that many folks in metro areas take for granted.
This is not a case of better or worse lifestyles. It is just an indication of the range of differences (and therefore the range of opportunities) in which the NED vision is being formed.
Even if wildly successful and the NED network/chain were to grow to many hundreds of storefronts, there is little chance that there will be one in our town or in any of the thousands of rural small towns and distressed urban communities that might want one.
So please do not be overly focused on urban/exurban bricks and mortar as a context for the NED vision. The danger is that this focus could skew the perceived demographic of the NED customer base. And this skew could warp the NED vision into becoming the very thing to which it is trying to be a counterpoint.
–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–
November 30th, 2005
John Berger said:
[snip] So, my recommendation is: while it is great to think about franchise and growth plans, the most important thing to do is to get the first NED shop up and running. The business plan should be 90% about the first store and only 10% about the future plans. Also, while it is great to hope that you have record setting margins and sales, you need to establish the business so that it will survive or even prosper if the results are far below your dreams.
Hello, John. Welcome to the NED thread. While your post was full of practical insights, we singled out (and added a bit of emphasis to) the above bit because we 200% concur with your recommendation.
As we move to the Flat World of collaborative networks of empowered individuals, the world of business will become less organization-centric. For NED to be a successful and sustainable 21st Century business venture, we believe it will be realized as an entrepreneurial community ecosystem. Its many piece-parts may reflect any number of organizing models as expressed in the various legal entity types available.
Each collaborative network/ecosystem partner will have a number of decisions to make about how they organize, fund their start up and initial participation, and behave within this collective enterprise. There will be no One Right Way to structure, fund, and manage/influence a network partner.
The franchise aspect of the current NED discussion is interesting from a “what NED might look like” standpoint. But this portion of the discussion is certainly not what has drawn us to, nor what sustains our interest, in the collective NED envisioning. It is very likely that the franchise model will be too constraining, particularly given the regulatory and financing constraints you mentioned.
The same “square peg, round hole” problem will limit the utility of the nonagricultural co-op model. Co-op regulatory requirements different from U.S. state to state, and nation to nation. In addition, co-ops are often constrained from retaining earnings and so are not suitable if a goal of NED is to provide a “sweat equity” means for network/ecosystem members from marginalized communities to participate in true shared wealth production.
We can’t help but think that NED, once realized, will be much more organic and dynamic than can be described by any existing single business organization model.
One thing we are sure of is that no matter what form the various piece-parts of the NED Network take on, an Internet software-based ‘nervous system’ and marketplace ‘construction set’ will be a vital component of the network’s success.
eBay’s breakthrough innovation was due, in no small way, to it being a very lightweight (in terms of human resources) business organization powered by some clever software that tapped the emerging potential of the Internet as market-making infrastructure. If NED can be imagined as the ‘next eBay‘, then most certainly a core of some clever and appropriate software will be vital to its success.
So, based on John’s insightful recommendation, when we think about the 90% focus for that first NED store, we believe that it should be an eCommerce store/marketplace rather than a bricks and mortar establishment. The primary goal of this initial on-line marketplace should be to provide a highly engaging proof of concept of the proposed marketplace and supply/value chain dynamics. In addition, this portal/store should serve as an effective extranet facilitating prospective network/ecosystem member participation.
–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–
November 30th, 2005
Paul O’Hara said:
Jim and Timlynn said: * “The world desperately needs alternative markets that address the myriad of other behavioural motivators that contribute to health and happiness”
Thanks Jim and Timlynn for bringing the price debate so far forward. Couldn’t agree more.
You are welcome, Paul. And thank you for contributing such a thoughtful and “spot on” reply.
??The heart has its reasons that reason does not know? Pascal
He’s so right. Pop forward a few centuries and you’ll find this same sentiment reflected in Danish futurist Rolf Jensen’s insightful book, The Dream Society, where he describes how we are becoming more Hunter-Gatherers of the Heart than Cultivators of the Mind. Jensen goes on to make a strong case for the emerging importance of story and emotion in marketing and organization ‘visioning’. We explore Jensen’s ideas further in Nanocorps in the Dream Society: How ‘Small is Good’ Business Webs Will Compete in the Story-driven Marketplaces of the 21st Century
“Happiness is when what one thinks, what one says, and what one does are in harmony” Ghandi
Again spot on, Paul. Notice what Gandhi doesn’t say… It isn’t about what you have, your stuff, that is important to a fulfilled, happy life. Madison Avenue would obviously consider Gandhi a dangerous person to be silenced if he was still around shaking things up.
If the three key purchasing drivers are price, quality and service and lowest price is not an option for an ethical retailer or the Small is Good market, then we must add equivalent or greater value back into the offer elsewhere.
Those three dimensions are adequate when you limit yourself to consumer purchase dynamics in the Big Is Good World. But we believe that Pascal, Ghandi, Jensen, and others are suggesting that there is much more to life that stuff consumption. Sure, price is important to a lot of folks. And, yes, they will pay more for appreciable quality. And service is worth paying for. But this still leaves a whole spectrum of Maslow-ian human needs to bring to the shopping experience. Paul, you go on to say…
Please consider Maslows Hierarchy of Needs … the human motivations which in turn drive our needs and eventually influence our behaviours. As we evolve up the hierarchy, I would hope that we will move away from todays ignorant and selfish pre-occupation with lowest price.
We’re on the same wavelength. Once we break the tight-coupling of price and product we can begin to transform the act of shopping into a diverse, interactive, impactful community- and world-changing experience that fulfills many human needs beyond our basic need for more stuff. When we start to realize this transformation, we will be on the road to Nedville which will be found somewhere in the emerging Small Is Good World.
–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–
November 29th, 2005
- Mark Grimes said:
- [snip] In other words, it needs to work on the $100 windup computer, so tech like Second Life is way out of the question for a few years. I’d love it if it could be done in Flash.
Both Christina and nmw hit the nail on the head… Flash simply does not meet your LCD criteria. The biggest issue being accessibility (not just disability-wise but cross-culturally) and bandwidth.
There are really two different LCDs to be met:
- Participant platform - minimum for a microenterprise supplier, community marketers, etc.
- On-line Shopper platform - minimum for a compelling story-driven, game-oriented shopping experience
As we discussed on our phone call, the LCD computer-based Participant platform should be the Nicholas Negroponte $100 laptop. (There also needs to be a ‘last mile’ participant platform that is not computer-based, but that is an issue for another conversation.)
The On-line Shopper platform is another issue entirely. While it is getting easier and easier to support multiple DDCs (device delivery channels), there still needs to be an LCD minimally acceptable platform. To our mind that means “modern” (but not cutting edge) HTML with CSS (cascading style sheets).
As we look at our various web site logs, the truly ancient browsers are disappearing. It used to be a significant challenge to write a static (or template-based dynamic) HTML page that could be rendered the same (or nearly so) in all the generation 3, 4, 5, etc. browsers. Even modest use of cascading stylesheets was problematic when there were so many browsers of so many evolutionary standards around.
Thankfully, we are moving beyond that Babel-onian era. There are a number of free, modern, full-featured, small-to-download web browsers that can handle a modern web page with CSS positioning and styles, etc. Add in optional Javascript and you would be amazed at how interactive your browsing experience can be.
So while exotic channels, such as SecondLife and Flash, may find a role to play in NED on-line commerce, we believe these channels must be optional supplements rather than a minimum entry requirement.
–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–
November 29th, 2005
nmw said:
Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn said:
price does not have to be the ultimate driver of markets.
I am also trained as an economist (I have several documents with letters on them) and I am also inspired by the work of Schumacher — but the statement above is very difficult to swallow (especially for an economist).
Give me a buck and I’ll tell you some more.
;D nmw
Indeed nmw. It is that very training that ties you to a mindset that is only as real as we accept it to be. Our collective Industrial Era experience is but a blink of the human experience eye. The laws of economics are not so fixed, relatively (or locally relativity-wise) speaking, as those of physics or the other so-called ‘hard’ sciences.
As a human/social science, economics invites experimentation as much as it provides a growing fount of information to guide our thinking. But we cannot let that fount flood our thinking and blind us to alternatives.
We simply would never have breakthrough scientific innovation if one or more inquirers did not ask, “Does it have to be this way?”
The Big Is Good World works best when its consumers are blindly herded by a Siren song telling them that price is king. It simply does not have to be so. And your brother’s sandal story above is a case in point.
Imagine if as many smart, highly motivated economic, behavioral, social, and marketing management scientists suspended disbelief and put as much energy into exploring the multitude of other dimensions of consumer purchase decision dynamics as have been put into honing our skills at single-minded focus on price. We simply have turned a blind eye to the possibilities beyond the obvious.
If money buys stuff, and if happiness is achieved by having enough of all the right stuff — isn’t that the drumbeat of modern marketing? — then why are so many people in affluent societies so unhappy?
The answer is simple. The widely shared misbelief that the acquisition of stuff at the expense of the active and ongoing participation in community is broken. The Big Is Good World’s path to happiness leads to perpetually unsatisfied consumers. This is no accident, it is by design. The Big Is Good World would put itself out of business if stuff-consumption led to satiated customers.
We’re not saying to abandon the Big Is Good World of stuff, only to moderate it with an exciting and engaging alternative. The world desperately needs alternative markets that address the myriad of other behavioral motivators that contribute to health and happiness. And paradoxically, these other market dynamics are not likely to be based on appeals to altruistic benevolence.
When we have a well-tuned economic engine that runs on the twin cylinders of the Big Is Good World and Small Is Good World, charity as we know it will fall into a marginalized role of a tactic of last resort.
–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–
November 22nd, 2005
Christina (Kirabo the Gift Mom) Jordan said:
OK, you have my arms, legs and mind… What is our next concrete step?
Hi Christina! 
As you may know, we had an extended ‘mind-meld’ telephone conversation with Mark on Saturday. The ‘tyranny’ post above is a direct result of that conversation. We want to start getting some NED Design Prepositions on the table that can drive our next concrete collaborative steps.
Although we haven’t firmed up plans specifically yet with Mark, we have an inkling that one immediate step we might take. We’d like to get directly involved with Mark in the design and development of the NED On-line prototype eCommerce web site he is working on to offer LiA crafts purchased from your WE Center folks not too long ago.
To back-fill the story of our readiness for this adventure, over the last several months we have had a contract development project that gave us an opportunity to dig deeply into Drupal, an Open Source content management platform. that has a unique and flexible eCommerce framework add-on. It is ideal for actively prototyping the story-driven and game-oriented ideas we have for Small Is Good World markets.
If we can work with Mark on this ‘front end’ aspect of the marketplace, then perhaps we can engage Toby Beresford of MicroAid.net to provide an opportunity identification, investment, and payment system that would tie Mark’s web store to your WE Center microenterprises.
If we were to ‘divide and conquer’ this agenda along the lines described here, we would be taking some Giant Steps toward birthing NED’s Small Is Good World entrepreneurial community ecosystem. Cool, eh! Just like we were talking about over beers in Oxford at the Skoll World Forum last March.
So bottom line, next steps look like some simple collaborative agreements to work together, and we have to put together a short and specific work and funding plan to make it fly.
Onward! The game’s afoot…
–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–
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–
November 21st, 2005
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