Government funding for academic research will remain limited, and competition for grants will remain high. Broad adjustments will be needed
Redistributing Leadership in Online Creative Collaboration | Follow the Crowd - 1 views
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MES - McGill Entrepreneurs' Society - 0 views
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Promote entrepreneurship among students and members of the Montreal Community Support students with their entrepreneurial ventures by means of advising, funds, bank account, networking opportunities and much more Network with local business organizations and make their resources available to club members Give anyone with a project in mind the opportunity to form their team, take a leadership position, and bring their idea to an end
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The New Normal in Funding University Science | Issues in Science and Technology - 1 views
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systemic problems that arise from the R&D funding system and incentive structure that the federal government put in place after World War II
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unding rates in many National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) programs are now at historical lows, declining from more than 30% before 2001 to 20% or even less in 2011
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even the most prominent scientists will find it difficult to maintain funding for their laboratories, and young scientists seeking their first grant may become so overwhelmed that individuals of great promise will be driven from the field
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The growth of the scientific enterprise on university campuses during the past 60 years is not sustainable and has now reached a tipping point at which old models no longer work
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ederal funding agencies must work with universities to ensure that new models of funding do not stymie the progress of science in the United States
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The deeper sources of the problem lie in the incentive structure of the modern research university, the aspirations of scientists trained by those universities, and the aspirations of less research-intensive universities and colleges across the nation
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if a university wants to attract a significant amount of sponsored research money, it needs doctoral programs in the relevant fields and faculty members who are dedicated to both winning grants and training students
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Even though not all doctorate recipients become university faculty, the size of the science and engineering faculty at U.S. universities has grown substantially
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These strategies make sense for any individual university, but will fail collectively unless federal funding for R&D grows robustly enough to keep up with demand.
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At the very time that universities were enjoying rapidly growing budgets, and creating modes of operation that assumed such largess was the new normal, Price warned that it would all soon come to a halt
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the human and financial resources invested in science had been increasing much faster than the populations and economies of those regions
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growth in the scientific enterprise would have to slow down at some point, growing no more than the population or the economy.
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studies sounded an alarm about the potential decline in U.S. global leadership in science and technology and the grave implications of that decline for economic growth and national security
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Although we are not opposed to increasing federal funding for research, we are not optimistic that it will happen at anywhere near the rate the Academies seek, nor do we think it will have a large impact on funding rates
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universities should not expect any radical increases in domestic R&D budgets, and most likely not in defense R&D budgets either, unless the discretionary budgets themselves grow rapidly. Those budgets are under pressure from political groups that want to shrink government spending and from the growth of spending in mandatory programs
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The basic point is that the growth of the economy will drive increases in federal R&D spending, and any attempt to provide rapid or sustained increases beyond that growth will require taking money from other programs.
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The demand for research money cannot grow faster than the economy forever and the growth curve for research money flattened out long ago.
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The goal cannot be to convince the government to invest a higher proportion of its discretionary spending in research
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Getting more is not in the cards, and some observers think the scientific community will be lucky to keep what it has
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The potential to take advantage of the infrastructure and talent on university campuses may be a win-win situation for businesses and institutions of higher education.
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Why should universities and colleges continue to support scientific research, knowing that the financial benefits are diminishing?
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faculty members are committed to their scholarship and will press on with their research programs even when external dollars are scarce
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it is critical to have active research laboratories, not only in elite public and private research institutions, but in non-flagship public universities, a diverse set of private universities, and four-year colleges
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How then do increasingly beleaguered institutions of higher education support the research efforts of the faculty, given the reality that federal grants are going to be few and far between for the majority of faculty members? What are the practical steps institutions can take?
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change the current model of providing large startup packages when a faculty member is hired and then leaving it up to the faculty member to obtain funding for the remainder of his or her career
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universities invest less in new faculty members and spread their internal research dollars across faculty members at all stages of their careers, from early to late.
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national conversation about changes in startup packages and by careful consultations with prospective faculty hires about long-term support of their research efforts
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Many prospective hires may find smaller startup packages palatable, if they can be convinced that the smaller packages are coupled with an institutional commitment to ongoing research support and more reasonable expectations about winning grants.
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Smaller startup packages mean that in many situations, new faculty members will not be able to establish a functioning stand-alone laboratory. Thus, space and equipment will need to be shared to a greater extent than has been true in the past.
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construction of open laboratory spaces and the strategic development of well-equipped research centers capable of efficiently servicing the needs of an array of researchers
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Collaborative proposals and the assembly of research teams that focus on more complex problems can arise relatively naturally as interactions among researchers are facilitated by proximity and the absence of walls between laboratories.
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The more likely trajectory of a junior faculty member will evolve from contributing team member to increasing leadership responsibilities to team leader
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nternal evaluations of contributions and potential will become more important in tenure and promotion decisions.
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relationships with foundations, donors, state agencies, and private business will become increasingly important in the funding game
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Further complicating university collaborations with business is that past examples of such partnerships have not always been easy or free of controversy.
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some faculty members worried about firms dictating the research priorities of the university, pulling graduate students into proprietary research (which could limit what they could publish), and generally tugging the relevant faculty in multiple directions.
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University faculty and businesspeople often do not understand each other’s cultures, needs, and constraints, and such gaps can lead to more mundane problems in university/industry relations, not least of which are organizational demands and institutional cultures
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n addition to funding for research, universities can receive indirect benefits from such relationships. High-profile partnerships with businesses will underline the important role that universities can play in the economic development of a region.
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Universities have to see firms as more than just deep pockets, and firms need to see universities as more than sources of cheap skilled labor.
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We do not believe that research proposed and supervised by individual principal investigators will disappear anytime soon. It is a research model that has proven to be remarkably successful and enduring
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However, we believe that the most vibrant scientific communities on university and college campuses, and the ones most likely to thrive in the new reality of funding for the sciences, will be those that encourage the formation of research teams and are nimble with regard to funding sources, even as they leave room for traditional avenues of funding and research.
Leadership Grants - Small Business and Entrepreneurs - 1 views
www.leadershipgrants.ca/...index.jsp
online grant entrepreneurs leadership grants small business business
shared by Francois Bergeron on 29 Mar 13
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The commons law project: A vision of green governance - 0 views
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Commons law consists of those social practices, cultural traditions and specific bodies of formal law that recognize the rights of commoners to manage their own resources
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Ever since the rise of the nation-state and especially industrialized markets, however, commons law has been marginalized if not eclipsed by contemporary forms of market-based law
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individual property rights and market exchange have been elevated over most everything else, and this has only eroded the rights of commoners,
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we had concluded that incremental efforts to expand human rights and environmental protection within the framework of the State/Market duopoly were simply not going to achieve much
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the existing system of regulation and international treaties has been a horrendous failure over the past forty years. Neoliberal economics has corrupted and compromised law and regulation, slashing away at responsible stewardship of our shared inheritance while hastening a steady decline of the world’s ecosystems
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We concluded that new forms of ecological governance that respect human rights, draw upon commons models and reframe our understanding of economic value, hold great promise
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An economics and supporting civic polity that valorizes growth and material development as the precondition for virtually everything else is ultimately a dead end—literally.
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Achieving a clean, healthy and ecologically balanced environment requires that we cultivate a practical governance paradigm based on, first, a logic of respect for nature, sufficiency, interdependence, shared responsibility and fairness among all human beings; and, second, an ethic of integrated global and local citizenship that insists upon transparency and accountability in all activities affecting the integrity of the environment.
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We believe that commons- and rights-based ecological governance—green governance—can fulfill this logic and ethic. Properly done, it can move us beyond the neoliberal State and Market alliance—what we call the ‘State/Market’—which is chiefly responsible for the current, failed paradigm of ecological governance.
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The basic problem is that the price system, seen as the ultimate governance mechanism of our polity, falls short in its ability to represent notions of value that are subtle, qualitative, long-term and complicated.
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anything that does not have a price and exists ‘outside’ the market is regarded (for the purposes of policy-making) as having subordinate or no value.
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regulation has become ever more insulated from citizen influence and accountability as scientific expertise and technical proceduralism have come to be more and more the exclusive determinants of who may credibly participate in the process
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we have reached the limits of leadership and innovation within existing institutions and policy structures
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it will not be an easy task to make the transition from State/Market ecological governance to commons- and rights-based ecological governance
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It requires that we enlarge our understanding of ‘value’ in economic thought to account for nature and social well-being; that we expand our sense of human rights and how they can serve strategic as well as moral purposes; that we liberate ourselves from the limitations of State-centric models of legal process; and that we honor the power of non-market participation, local context and social diversity in structuring economic activity and addressing environmental problems.
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deficiencies of centralized governments (corruption, lack of transparency, rigidity, a marginalized citizenry)
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POWER-CURVE SOCIETY: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Eme... - 1 views
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how technological innovation is restructuring productivity and the social and economic impact resulting from these changes
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concern about the technological displacement of jobs, stagnant middle class income, and wealth disparities in an emerging "winner-take-all" economy
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personal data ecosystems that could potentially unlock a revolutionary wave of individual economic empowerment
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As the technology boom of the 1990s increased productivity, many assumed that the rising water level of the economy was raising all those middle class boats. But a different phenomenon has also occurred. The wealthy have gained substantially over the past two decades while the middle class has remained stagnant in real income, and the poor are simply poorer.
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America is turning into a power-curve society: one where there are a relative few at the top and a gradually declining curve with a long tail of relatively poorer people.
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For the first time since the end of World War II, the middle class is apparently doing worse, not better, than previous generations.
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as businesses struggle to come to terms with this revolution, a new set of structural innovations is washing over businesses, organizations and government, forcing near-constant adaptation and change. It is no exaggeration to say that the explosion of innovative technologies and their dense interconnections is inventing a new kind of economy.
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the new technologies are clearly driving economic growth and higher productivity, the distribution of these benefits is skewed in worrisome ways.
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the networked economy seems to be producing a “power-curve” distribution, sometimes known as a “winner-take-all” economy
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major component of this new economy, Big Data, and the coming personal data revolution fomenting beneath it that seeks to put individuals, and not companies or governments, at the forefront. Companies in the power-curve economy rely heavily on big databases of personal information to improve their marketing, product design, and corporate strategies. The unanswered question is whether the multiplying reservoirs of personal data will be used to benefit individuals as consumers and citizens, or whether large Internet companies will control and monetize Big Data for their private gain.
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A special concern is whether information and communications technologies are actually eliminating more jobs than they are creating—and in what countries and occupations.
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Is it polarizing income and wealth distributions? How is it changing the nature of work and traditional organizations and altering family and personal life?
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many observers fear a wave of social and political disruption if a society’s basic commitments to fairness, individual opportunity and democratic values cannot be honored
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what role government should play in balancing these sometimes-conflicting priorities. How might educational policies, research and development, and immigration policies need to be altered?
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Conventional economics says that progress comes from new infusions of capital, whether financial, physical or human. But those are not necessarily the things that drive innovation
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economists have developed a number of proxy metrics for innovation, such as research and development expenditures.
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Atkinson believes that economists both underestimate and overestimate the scale and scope of innovation.
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Calculating the magnitude of innovation is also difficult because many innovations now require less capital than they did previously.
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believes that technological innovation follows the path of an “S-curve,” with a gradual increase accelerating to a rapid, steep increase, before it levels out at a higher level. One implication of this pattern, he said, is that “you maximize the ability to improve technology as it becomes more diffused.” This helps explain why it can take several decades to unlock the full productive potential of an innovation.
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innovation keeps getting harder. It was pretty easy to invent stuff in your garage back in 1895. But the technical and scientific challenges today are huge.”
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costs of innovation have plummeted, making it far easier and cheaper for more people to launch their own startup businesses and pursue their unconventional ideas
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Atkinson conceded such cost-efficiencies, but wonders if “the real question is that problems are getting more complicated more quickly than the solutions that might enable them.
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we may need to parse the different stages of innovation: “The cost of innovation generally hasn’t dropped,” he argued. “What has become less expensive is the replication and diffusion of innovation.”
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A lot of barriers to innovation can be found in the lack of financing, organizational support systems, regulation and public policies.
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there is a serious mismatch between the pace of innovation unleashed by Moore’s Law and our institutional and social capacity to adapt.
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This raises the question of whether old institutions can adapt—or whether innovation will therefore arise through other channels entirely. “Existing institutions are often run by followers of conventional wisdom,”
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The best way to identify new sources of innovation, as Arizona State University President Michael Crow has advised, is to “go to the edge and ignore the center.”
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Paradoxically, one of the most potent barriers to innovation is the accelerating pace of innovation itself.
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Part of the problem, he continued, is that our economy is based on “push-based models” in which we try to build systems for scalable efficiencies, which in turn demands predictability.
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The real challenge is how to achieve radical institutional innovations that prepare us to live in periods of constant two- or three-year cycles of change. We have to be able to pick up new ideas all the time.”
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The App Economy consists of a core company that creates and maintains a platform (such as Blackberry, Facebook or the iPhone), which in turn spawns an ecosystem of big and small companies that produce apps and/or mobile devices for that platform
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tied this success back to the open, innovative infrastructure and competition in the U.S. for mobile devices
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small businesses are becoming more comfortable using such systems to improve their marketing and lower their costs; and, vast new pools of personal data are becoming extremely useful in sharpening business strategies and marketing.
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Another great boost to innovation in some business sectors is the ability to forge ahead without advance permission or regulation,
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“In bio-fabs, for example, it’s not the cost of innovation that is high, it’s the cost of regulation,”
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“In Europe and China, the law holds that unless something is explicitly permitted, it is prohibited. But in the U.S., where common law rather than Continental law prevails, it’s the opposite
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Innovative schemes for open innovation and science 2.0 INSO-4-2015 - 0 views
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assist universities to become open innovation centres for their region in cooperation with companies, realising the ERA priorities, and to enable public administrations to drive innovation in and through the public sector.
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help universities, companies and public authorities to enhance their capacity to engage in science 2.0 and open innovation.
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effective linkages for innovation between universities and companies and other employment sectors, and provide freely accessible innovation training platforms, including digital platforms.
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develop or (further) implement open innovative schemes to strengthen linkages between academia, industry and community
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Research institutions together with companies are expected to build sustainable structures which help to absorb needs of users and thereby become co-creators of new solutions. SMEs should be encouraged to participate.
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developing curricula and providing freely through online platforms, possibly combined with other delivery mechanisms, innovation training for public administrations and researchers.
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United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) - 0 views
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Promoting and Assessing Value Creation in Networks - P2P Foundation - 1 views
p2pfoundation.net/ing_Value_Creation_in_Networks
value creation networks theory model value system contribution accounting paper
shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 12
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The first level—related to the satisfaction level—is called "immediate value" and it assesses what just happened, for example, in a webinar
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The second level is called "potential value," and I like to think of this as the new knowledge or understanding that is lying latent but ready to be put to use in the future
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The third level does this, and it is called "applied value" and this is where the model starts to become interesting to CEOs and others
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hard metrics like reduced development time, improved efficiencies, or financial returns. The fourth level in the framework provides this, and the level is called "realized value."
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he fifth level is where the community changes as a result of the activity occurring in the first four levels. At this highest level, the framework examines changes in the community—norms, standards, practices, and thought leadership—that has occurred as a result of activity within the community
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The basic orientation of p2p theory towards societal reform: transforming civil society... - 1 views
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in a capitalist system, ‘civil society’ is not directly productive of the goods and services that we need to survive, live and thrive
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everything that needs to be made, has to be designed through collaborative innovation in the first place
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Both civil society and the notion of citizenship can be criticized for being insufficiently inclusionary, and therefore as ‘mechanisms of exclusion’.
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consisting of shared depositories of knowledge, code and design; the communities of contributors and users of such commons
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democratically governed by all participants and stakeholders in such commons
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civil society is the locus of the shared abundance of value creation, and the place for the continual dialogue regarding the necessities of common life.
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democratically decide
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the ‘common good’ of society as a whole
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The difference is that the commons where the immaterial value is created are positioned in a field of abundance characteristic for non-rival or anti-rival goods; while the for-benefit associations are responsible for the sometimes contentious allocation of rival infrastructures.
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Whereas the commons themselves are plurarchies based on permissionless contribution, forking and other rights guaranteeing the diversity of contributions and contributors; the for-benefit associations are democratically governed.
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true reform of the private sector and the corporate form.
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Under conditions of the rule of capital, for-profit corporations are beholden to work for the interests of the shareholders. This format allows for the accumulation of capital, but also indirectly of political power, through the power of money to influence politics and politicians. For-profit corporations are part of a system of infinite growth and compound interest, must continuously compete with other corporations, and therefore, also minimize costs. For-profit corporations are designed to ignore negative environmental externalities by avoiding to pay the costs associated with them; and to ignore positive social externalities, also by avoiding to pay for them. In terms of sustainability, corporations practice planned obsolescence as a rule, because while the market is a scarcity allocation mechanism, capitalism itself is a scarcity maintenance and creation mechanism. Anti-sustainable practices are systemic and part of the DNA of the for-profit corporation.
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Under conditions of peer production, design and innovation moves to commons-based communitiies, which lack the incentive for unsustainable design; products are inherently design for sustainability, and the production process itself is designed for openness and distribution.
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designed to make the commoners and the commons themselves sustainable, by not ‘leaking’ surplus value to external shareholders
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mission-oriented, community supportive, sustainability-oriented corporate forms, that operate in the marketplace but do not themselves reproduce capitalism.
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surplus value stays within the commons, allows its autonomous social reproduction, and sustains the commoners
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because commons and their communities are themselves specific, and do not automatically take into account the common good of society as a whole .
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A Partner State functions center around enabling and empowering social production and abandons some of the paternalistic aspects of the welfare state by focusing on strengthening the possibilities of autonomy.