Towards a New Literacy of Cooperation with Business
Report: Towards a New Literacy of Cooperation with Business.Howard Rheingold et al. (with support from Sam Rose). Institute for the Future, 2007 (67 pages)
URL = http://www.iftf.org/system/files/deliverables/SR-851A_New_Literacy_Cooperation.pdf
Description
From the introduction:
"Traditional business strategy is organized around competition: win–lose models fueled by SWOT analyses, market share frameworks, hard measurement, and protection of quantifiable private assets. In mature industries, cooperation is confined to supporting industry associations, which focus on issues of common concerns such as tax rules, and professional bodies, which set common technical standards. [1]
In the last two decades, however, we’ve seen a variety of challenges to business models that stress competition over customers, resources, and ideas.
• Companies in emerging high-tech industries have learned that working with competitors can build markets and help avoid costly standards wars.
• The open source movement has shown that world-class software can be built without corporate oversight or market incentives.
• Google and Amazon have built fortunes by drawing on—and even improving—the Internet.
• Outsourcing has turned competitors into common customers of design firms and contract manufacturers.
The value of competition-oriented strategies will further decline as emerging technologies and new media diffuse from high-tech into traditional industries and as global industries become more fluid and flexible. Connective and pervasive technologies are enabling new forms of human and machine interactions and relationships; they will present business institutions with a host of new possibilities for organizing people, processes, relationships and knowledge. These forces will accelerate a shift in business strategy from solving concrete business problems to managing complex business dilemmas, which in turn will require a broader set of strategic tools and concepts than are provided by competitive models."