Tuesday, September 12, 2006

collaboration is the new competition

How many times have we heard economist to policitians espoucing that competition is the key influencer in keeping markets efficient and staving off monopoly tendencies. The classic story being how if a market is producing excess profits then that will encourage new market entrants in to share in those profit but the net effect is that prices lower and thus all end consumers benefit.

That is the economics of the market driven economy, the economics of the 'attention' economy will see collaboration as the new competition mantra by the attionomists and policitians. How will that story go?

An individual demands a new service. The current flow of service has never been asked for that service before, those with the skills and talents contribute to that new service by offering up their time. The service is delivered. Other individuals are inspired by the new service and add their demand. The colloborators devote more of their time to this new service. However, demand keep coming and it's not a mass flow for homogeneous service, these are individual, personalized service demands, new iterations or even new evolutions of the original. The existing collaborators can not serve all the demand, attention pricing does not increase because new collaborators enter to serve the demand, (time will have allowed for retraining of skills and automation of key limiting factors now in the new service creation) and all individuals receive the service they require.


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