Shower in the Dark
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The Emerging, Collaborative Economy
“At the recent PSFK Conference in NYC, various presenters spoke about platforms for collaborative production and consumption. Yancey Strickler discussed Kickstarter’s collaborative funding of creative projects, for example, and Joe Gebbia talked about Airbnb’s collaborative consumption of private space, ranging from urban living rooms to forested tree houses. The lineup of speakers hinted towards an emerging, integrated system of collaborative production and consumption, i.e. an emerging collaborative economy. Note that when I refer to this collaborative economy, I’m not talking about the OpenIDEOs and Innocentives that occur between companies and their customers, but about – using the word of PSFK co-founder Piers Fawkes – “disintermediated” collaboration between people, à la peer production and collaborative consumption…”
-The Emerging, Collaborative Economy, originally posted on Smart Mobs, by Stephanie Gerson
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Polyculture+Tech Part I: Growing Guilds
“As part of the agricultural sustainability movement, backyard, urban, and rural gardeners and farmers are increasingly attempting to grow polycultures. Permaculture guilds are designed polycultural systems, composed of plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms that grow particularly well together. Perhaps the oldest and best-known guild is the Three Sisters, which consists of corn, squash, and beans and has been grown throughout Mesomerica for thousands of years. The corn acts as a pole for the climbing beans, bacteria in the beans’ roots fertilize the corn and squash, and the squash acts as a shade structure for the roots of all three ‘sisters,’ keeping their roots cool and holding moisture in the soil…”
-Polyculture+Tech Part I: Growing Guilds, originally posted on Food+Tech Connect, by Stephanie Gerson
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Long Brands: Unlocking Cultural Artifacts
“…The Cosmos story presents the possibility of brands as cultural artifacts, to cease and be revived as is culturally necessary. What if brands, and more importantly their value, could be ‘unlocked’ when the right season returned? How to (re-) unlock the brand value of The New York Cosmos is precisely the question Cherry III and Tran are delightedly wrestling with. The more difficult question, however, may be how to allow brands to die, or rather hibernate, in a non-destructive way…”
-Long Brands: Unlocking Cultural Artifacts, originally posted on PSFK, by Stephanie Gerson
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Does Innovation Have Politics?: Part II
In Part I of this series, I highlighted an overarching theme running through Bill Taylor’s Practically Radical, namely that in today’s uncertain business landscape, the capacity for organizational innovation and change require a more democratic model of leadership.I riffed on this theme’s various implications, and landed here: The argument that organizational innovation requires a democratization of leadership suggests an inherent relationship between innovation and equitability. Meaning, it’s not that organizations should be more equitable because it’s the right thing to do, which any labor advocate or even young child could have told you; rather organizations should be more equitable because it enables them to more successfully adapt and grow in uncertain circumstances…”
-Does Innovation Have Politics?: Part II, originally posted on BIFSpeak, by Stephanie Gerson
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Does Innovation Have Politics?: Part I
“I’m not usually one for management guru literature, but I just finished Bill Taylor’s Practically Radical, and confess to having sincerely enjoyed it. Essentially, it’s a compilation of fascinating stories about organizations making transformative change, and only peripherally embellished with jargony tips and tricks. What most interested me was the explicit and implicit theme running through the book: To innovate and change in circumstances of high uncertainty and fierce competition, organizations must decentralize power, both internally, from executive leadership to frontline staff, and externally, from the organization to its consumers…”
-Does Innovation Have Politics?: Part I, originally posted on BIFSpeak, by Stephanie Gerson
