Collaborative Advantage as Competitive Advantage
Most people associate evolution with "survival of the fittest," but actually symbiosis is the dominant pattern in nature. Collaboration drives more success than hardcore individualistic competition. How can organizations in the economy build collaborative advantage much like how organisms in nature build group resilience?
Researching Infrastructure for Win-Wins
For the past few months, I've been working on a symbiotic economics research project in conjunction with three groups: Purpose Foundation, OneProject and Common Trust.
The project actually has a broader scope than shared ownership-- we are also interested in ways of doing business that weave multiple firms together toward shared prosperity. In particular, we are interested in a "collaboration infrastructure layer" that sits between business and government.
Business is mostly concerned with starting and operating individual firms, and managing for the financial outcome of that one company. Government is mostly focused on regulating business for safety and fairness, but isn't very good at stewarding the economy to avoid major recessions or ensure most citizens actually get a fair shake. Civil society tries to fill in the gaps that government misses, with private funding.
So our research focuses on an infrastructure layer for managing relationship within the economy; almost like a civil society for the business community.
A quick peek at some of our topics:
Continuous Liquidity Mechanisms
Balance Sheet Aggregation
Stakeholder Holding Companies
Financial Products for Employee Buyouts
Pooled Credit Networks
Deep Trust + Relationship Capital
Mutual Exchange Networks
Private Collaboration Networks
Retail Investment + Secondary Markets
Uhhh, could you give me an example of that?
A great example of Private Collaboration Networks is a shared services cooperative. Instead of hiring a 3rd party vendor to run HR or bookkeeping, multiple small companies pool together and start an HR & bookkeeping service that they time-share, at cost. This ensure the service is totally focused and designed for their exact needs, and they get quality, affordable outcomes.
What's Next?
We're about halfway through our research- we've done the initial legwork, and now we're starting to make sense of what we've found. We'll be sharing more of our learnings soon, both in incremental posts and a final glossy report. We're extra keen on very actionable opportunities that don't require tons of philanthropic capital or major government policy changes.