- Customer to Customer (C-to-C) Interactions
- This paper, presented by Jiro Kokuryo of Keio University, Japan, gave an analysis based on evidence from the use of the NiftyServe network (equivalent to CompuServe), pointing to how the dynamics of the marketplace are being changed by the increased facility with which customers for a particular company or product can form their own networks of interaction. It was refreshing to see a focus on this very important aspect of the networked economy as a contrast to the usually more limited focus on supplier-customer interactions and supply chains. Some charts and commentary from the presentation will be uploaded here shortly.
- Is the challenge to policy makers overwhelming?
- Brian Kahin of the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard is now joining the White House in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, so his insights into policy questions can't be taken lightly! He says there is radical change in the economic landscape and that the changes, which are best understood by Internet and software entrepreneurs, are "too complex to model and often paradoxical . . . Policy development in this environment loses its bearings and becomes overwhelmed by complexity and change". Government structures, evolved in a more stable and manageable age, suffer from problems of jurisdiction (when its not clear who owns the problem) and competency (under whose competency should the problem be addressed?) as well as the impossibility of understanding the issues except from inside the market. I would paraphrase (possibly wrongly!) Brian Kahin's key message for policy makers to:
- seek out and inhibit the predatory use of market dominance
and
- enable environments that don't inhibit innovation.
- Abduction - could this be the answer?
- Yasunori Baba of the University of Tokyo presented a very interesting paper derived from the Boeing "777" aircraft development project, which sought to apply ICTs on a global basis to concurrent product development. He also raised the interesting insight that Japanese companies were now having to decide whether to respond to similar invitations from Airbus, which has adopted approaches that are so different (from Boeing's) as to present suppliers and partners with a significant "learning curve investment" if they want to work with both Airbus and Boeing.
For me the most stimulating item in his paper was his use of the term "abduction" to describe a form of reasoning or "coming to conclusions", as an alternative to the more familiar deduction and induction. His paper refers to the work of CS Peirce, a 19th Century philosopher hitherto unknown to me. Abduction seems to mean much the same as "personal judgement based on experience, know how and intuition". Its always been my favourite method!
- Its not what you own its who you do business with
- Bob Anderson, director of the Rank Xerox research centre at Cambridge (UK) provided a refreshing challenge to the ideas that "content is king" and "strengthened protection of IPR is a high priority".
"Our standard model is one of defensive assurance through asserting patent protection for key intellectual property. However," he asserts, "more and more the key enabler for the realisation of business value lies not in the distinctiveness of the technology but in the market connectedness of the delivery organisation: on its ability, that is, to understand the marketplace, spot the opportunities and move quickly and effectively to assemble the components to cash in on them."
"Its hard to protect market connectedness."
As with so many of the papers one would have liked a little more time to allow some of Bob Anderson's useful insights to be absorbed!
- Information sharing and the need for "sufficient confidence"
- Brian Collins of the University of Glamorgan summed up many of the issues associated with security, privacy and property rights in an attractively human way:
- can I be adequately sure that an email I receive has come from whom it appears to come from?
- can I be acceptably sure that a web page I download hasn't been altered by someone unathorised?
- when I use some software can I be sure enough that it will not corrupt my computer systems or data?
- if I share personal or professional information how can I be sufficiently sure the other person(s) will look after it as I would wish?
When we travel in a train or an aircraft, buy insurance or shares, or order goods in response to an advertisement we do so on the basis of trust and confidence, built on a complex and invisible infrastructure of regulation, legislation, commercial practice, standards, training and certification. We don't need to know the details of this infrastructure, we just need confidence that its there and working for us. It doesn't need to work perfectly, so long as when something does go wrong we can be confident that there will be mechanisms we can use to correct mistakes and achieve redress.
The example of Alabania, where the lack of mature market mechanisms enabled an investment pyramid to gull such a high proportion of citizens, illustrates what can go wrong when a radical change has invalidated old mechanisms but not yet replaced them with new ones that provide "sufficient confidence".
- Electronic networks are interpersonal networks
- A paper from Charles Steinfield (Michigan State University) and others was revealing in its conclusions mainly because the conclusions seemed to surprise the researchers but will come as no surprise to anyone who is actively engaged in telecooperation as an enabler of trade.
There seems to be a widespread assumption that using "electronic network" is somehow different from "making interpersonal connections", with the implication that electronic networks are about formal transactions while interpersonal networking is about informal interactions. Of course the truth is that interpersonal networking (using email and other methods) is the most common use of Internet and other electronic networks. Steinfield and his colleagues have taken great pains to arrive at this conclusion, possibly hampered by approaching the question from a somewhat narrow "production inputs and outputs" perspective, even though two of the sectors studied (advertising and magazine publishing) are as much qualitative as quantitative in their approach to business. They may also have been hampered by a tendency to use language that makes sense in a manufacturing context but can be misleading in other contexts.
- Regulators: a question of objectives
- An interesting paper from Japan (Tsuruhinko Nambu, Gakushuin University) contrasted with one from the UK's OFTEL - Office of Telecommunications (Peter Walker). The history of regulation in Japan has largely been a history of intervention, direction and control - "The protectionist industrial policy of Japanese government which is still at the heart of regulatory policy is the ultimate cause of economic deficiency in the regulated industries". The UK experience, while perhaps not faultless, has been driven on the basis of an independent regulator working not to implement an ordained policy but to achieve high level objectives - the introduction of effective competition and the beneficial interests of consumers. A USA paper (R Clark Wadlow) provided a third perspective - that of spurring competition mainly by the removal of regulation (after the initial strategic move to break up the main dominant player). As competition becomes effective the UK regulator is moving in the same direction - reducing his own role and involvement as the market takes over.
