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Academic Articles and Books on Professional Guilds and Open Innovation

• Free Agents in the OldeWorld: The future of work in Free Agent Nation may look strangely like the past, says MIT's Thomas Malone. Prithee: Art thou ready to join a guild?, Fast Company, May 



• Retreat of the Firm and the Rise of Guilds: The Employment Relationship in an Age of Virtual Business, by Robert Laubacher and Thomas W. Malone, MIT. This paper appears in Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century, a volume of articles edited by Professors Malone and Laubacher and their colleague Michael Scott Morton



• Free Agent Nation, Dan Pink



• Work in the New Economy: Flexible Labor Markets in Silicon Valley, by Chris Benner, Manuel Castells, Preface



• The Open-Innovation Model, Henry W. Chesbrough, MIT Sloan Mgmt Review, Spring 2003



• Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, by Henry William Chesbrough



• Open Innovation: Interview with Henry Chesbrough, April 2003, Corante

Career/Job Websites and Social Networking Business Model

There is the potential of an eBay-like economy, with a transaction-based business model, once professionals accept 1) everyone is a free agent in the 21st century, forget being an employee, and 2) a critical mass of professionals have a viable web presence. This new economy will be based on the exchange of professional services thru a bartering system – essentially bypassing national forms of currency. eBay is already experimenting with alternative forms of currency, e.g. frequent flyer miles. and I suspect they are very deep into analyzing a bartering economy, not whether to do it, but when. Bartering is already very big business on the web…just do a Google search and I suspect you will be astonished at the types of merchandise and services, and the companies, that are already participating in bartering.

I believe there are only two really powerful uses of social networks – for jobs/career for white-collar professionals and “employee-type” roles, and for yellow page advertisers (yellow pages are essentially the proxy for personal commodity services, often location-dependent, e.g. real estate agents and for small businesses).

Friendster is silly for a variety of reasons, and the other social networking websites that are targeting professionals have failed to appreciate that free agents want to OWN their data – thus proprietary based systems (e.g. LinkedIn, Monster.com’s effort, Tribe.net, Spoke SW, Ryze) will fall by the wayside as open software solutions become available. In fact, it is already possible to create 95% of the needed functionality for an initial job/career social networking website out of freely available software and services (Google, Blogger, Yahoo Groups, etc.). See www.resumeblog.com for a straightforward example.

For more information on the above topics please read other posts in my blog, visit the ResumeBlog blog, my professional website at Typaldos.com, and the ProfGuilds/Software Product Marketing website.

I would love to get a small amount of funding for my concept – ProfGuilds – but unfortunately women entrepreneurs only receive 4% of venture funding. My team and I are looking for corporate funding instead.

Today I updated the post about Connections and Validations (dated Thurs Oct 30th). The post mainly links to an actual specification on Job/Career Networking Connections and Validations which I also updated.

I'm hoping to get some feedback.

Cynthia
cynthia@typaldos.com

Social networking is mostly silly

All of the rabid interest in social networking, and the use of the internet to do so, got me thinking about the real value provided. The whole concept may be flawed since "it´s who you know not what you know" is really a proxy for a measure of your competence, experience, and knowledge. That is, if someone is willing to recommend you (for a specific role) then that recommendation is a way of measuring whether in fact you have the knowledge, experience, talent, contacts, dedication etc. to actually accomplish whatever needs to be done. With the internet´s ability to allow you to actually demonstrate what you can and have done, and with validations by others that this is so (see my next post), WHO you know may actually be LESS important since you can demonstrate much more effectively WHAT you know and how you have successfully applied yourself in the past.