Filling In The Gaps With Tim O’Reilly: some great insights (hat tip to Dug Campbell)
O’Reilly argues that the concept of a business that exists solely for the purpose of making money for its shareholders is fundamentally flawed. Every business has an obligation to create value.
Gerd adds: great summary of where the future of capitalism is going !
We need to move from a system of waste to a system of reuse—an economy that’s a circle and not a line. Some businesses are getting closer to this ideal than others. Since the Industrial Revolution, humanity’s use of natural resources has been basically the same: take, make, throw away. The World Bank’s predictions for global waste generation are chastening: on current trends it will double between now and 2025 to 6.5 million tons of solid waste every day. For sure, we are better at using virgin resources more efficiently while second-hand markets and recycling rates have both improved. But this hasn’t altered the fundamentals. Many companies’ business models are not set up to do much else than earn money from volume. The fact that few businesses are vertically integrated makes it more difficult for businesses to reform the model for “closed” product loops even if their CEOs want to. When you add to this the OECD’s estimate of an extra two billion middle class consumers before 2030, commodity price volatility and new environmental regulations, you start to see the scale of the challenge. The good news, though, is that circular economy thinking—building an economy that doesn’t create waste—can make business-sense.
The new reality is, I’m afraid, a world of significantly lower growth, where the gap between our expectations and actual income is getting bigger day by day. Neither Keynesians nor austerians have an answer to this sober outlook because both sides claim their own policies will ultimately take us back to a world of rapidly advancing living standards.
Source: blog.thefuturescompany.com
Business models that embrace a system based on consumption alone are obsolete. It is crucial to evolve from a production-focused MEconomy to a WEconomy, founded on shared responsibility
Source: bbvaopenmind.com
Great examples of inequality
One receipt says customer has ‘insufficient funds’ to withdraw $100; Other is a $300 withdrawal on account with a balance of more than $1million They were both found outside branch of Chase bank (via The have and have-not: Two discarded receipts from same New York bank show the inequality of life in city | Mail Online)
The Futures Agency: The Future of Retail Presentation
Source: http://trend-forward.blogspot.com/2011/06/panic-confusion-in-retail.html
The retail industry is changing more than ever before. E-commerce has disrupted the brick-and-mortar format we’ve used for hundreds of years. Consumers have more options than ever before and will only…
The Boston Consulting Group reckons that in areas such as transport, computers, fabricated metals and machinery, 10-30% of the goods that America now imports from China could be made at home by 2020, boosting American output by $20 billion-55 billion a year.
Source: futuristgerd
How Innovation Could Save the Planet | World Future Society
The problem is not the abundance of the energy; the problem is cost. Our technology is primitive. Our technology for building solar cells is similar to our technology for manufacturing computer chips. They’re built on silicon wafers in clean rooms at high temperatures, and so they’re very, very expensive.
But innovation has been dropping that cost tremendously. Over the last 30 years, we’ve gone from a watt of solar power costing $20 to about $1. That’s a factor of 20. We roughly drop the cost of solar by one-half every decade, more or less. That means that, in the sunniest parts of the world today, solar is now basically at parity in cost, without subsidies, with coal and natural gas. Over the next 12–15 years, that will spread to most of the planet. That’s incredibly good news for us.
