The Digital Economist
Hi, I'm Sam Birmingham. I love startups, innovation and challenging the status quo.
For the vast majority of my years, economies have grown, companies have profited and people have got richer on the back of a once-in-a-lifetime demographic shift and debt-fuelled boom. Those days are through.
Economies must evolve beyond rampant consumerism and confront the demographic headwind that had been a tailwind until the Baby Boomers began retiring. Companies must become nimble, innovate and invent new products to address customers' ever-changing needs in this digitally-disrupted world. And as people, we must focus on solving problems and learn to do more with less.
These are the challenges that excite me. They are what I want to get out of bed each morning and be a part of. This is where I share my thoughts.
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I really like the hierarchy/networks dichotomy in this Brad Feld-narrated Kauffman Sketchbook, StartupVille:
“In entrepreneurship - especially at the early stages - there is no hierarchy. If the hierarchy tries to drive the startup community it essentially stifles it.
The hierarchy is really collapsing; and many, many, many more aspects of what we do are behaving as a network. This was my starting point for thinking about how startup communities evolve.”
In the same way that open ultimately beats closed, I believe that organic ultimately beats inorganic.
The question I’m asking myself at the moment, though, is does organic just happen? Is it better to provide some sort of framework or platform to facilitate the “networked chaos” that Brad talks about at the end of the video; or should the leaders simply just do what they do?
“Those four pieces are essential for the long-term health of a startup community. It’s just the sort of networked chaos of entrepreneurs doing what entrepreneurs do - which is create things. That force of the entrepreneurs to build something bigger than just themselves and their companies is incredibly powerful.”