This article was written by Mickey M.President and CEO at MAYA Design, Inc.
As the pervasive computing era comes into focus (trillions of computing devices connected to each other and to us), it’s clear that connectivity has the potential to crystallize a world-changing transition in the economics at the base of the pyramid. The “base of the pyramid” (BoP)—sometimes called “the bottom billion” or “the next billion”—describes the more than 4 billion people around the world who live on less than $2.50 a day.
We have no shortage of agile, creative and smart people in the world. By definition the current generation of humans, even in the poorest of villages, represents the culmination of millions of years of survival of the fittest. We are here because we are survivors. But just as the lack of flowing water can drive a population to extinction, the lack of information flow in a population deprives us all of their precious brains and creative passions. We are literally sitting on a wellspring of innovation, and in an age of exponential, malignant complexity we can't afford to leave those innovators, that might have been born in a base of the pyramid village, to die of thirst.
However, connectivity alone, while necessary is not sufficient. Just as liquid flowing through a rocky, porous, inhospitable and arid landscape will soon evaporate and leave us with little more than the residue of its passing, connectivity without a higher-order capacity for emergence and scale won’t transform BoP communities.
So, what’s missing? Call it "Generativity." It’s a pattern of beautiful rather than malignant complexity and it’s most recognizable in nature.
Malignant complexity
Imagine that we give everyone a playing card and ask them to join the great flow of construction on our palace of cards. Each person painstakingly invests time and energy artfully placing their cards on the palace. It starts with two cards leaning against each other in a simple way. But soon things get more complex. Some people build round rooms, others build steeples… soon a grand cathedral rises from our construction site. We stand proud of the collective ability of our innovators. But the joy is fleeting. A breeze ruffles the edges, and soon a wind picks up. The palace crashes down around us in a cascade of destruction. While it became ever more complex in scale and design, a lurking danger reared its ugly head. It goes by the name of malignant complexity.
Now imagine a slightly different scenario. What if everyone were given a Lego piece? The flow of parts soon leads to a grand construction. This time arches and domes bubble up out of the creative crowd. Innovations follow on innovations. Someone notices that the Lego framework is really just based on a connector made of one or more bumps that fit into corresponding sockets. Soon people are inventing new kinds of Legos that can bridge gaps. Others make clear versions to shed light on the construction, still others make custom versions that look like people but still have a bump on the top of the head and sockets for feet. People make shingle Legos, others make snap on wheels and axles and soon an entire city with vehicles rises up out of the flow of people and blocks.
Both of these scenarios were about connectivity, and both fostered the flow of value and invention. But one of them was malignant and tended towards catastrophic failure, while the other was beautiful in its complexity.
Beautiful Complexity
That same kind of beautiful complexity can be seen in Nature, where we find atoms that make up molecules that make up cells that make up organs that make up systems that make up life on Earth. This is a generative pattern—of process rather than form. It’s the capacity of a framework or system to foster emergence by adhering to a set of simple rules (atoms make up molecules, sockets fit into plugs, etc.).
What we'll need is not only "connectivity for all" as a right to be a part of the information flow, but also a way to cultivate new value out of the information flow.
Emerging Design Centers
Imagine if an inventor in a small village was given access to a generative framework. First, we’d help them learn the literacy of human-centered innovation, that way the inventor can sharpen their idea with a focus on bubbling up unmet or unvoiced needs. Second, we’d supply them with a way to "rip" the real world into bits and give them “Internet of Everything” authoring tools" that embed economics directly into the fabric of every design. Helping inventors from anywhere and any economic basis find and reward value in the intellectual efforts they make will be critical. Third we’d give them connectivity and a worldwide community of billions of other people. And fourth—and this one can be done in steps starting by repurposing the existing abundance of smart phones and other connected devices that flood the shores—we refactor the building blocks of manufacturing and computing into basic components that compute, store, sense, connect, and assemble. All this combined with a way to source local materials and fabrication resources sets the stage for a sort of "Emerging Design Center"seedling that can be planted in the village. Further, if done right, it could be the beginning of an "information carbon cycle" that fuels the age of Trillions.
The inventor could solve a problem. It could be assembled from those bins of refactored computing “raw material.” Maybe the product or service is built out of some bamboo and twine, maybe some computation and storage, maybe some sort of package that is 3D printed out of sand from the desert.
Those raw materials may be information devices that are sometimes hardware sometimes software. Call them "infotrons." [Aside: isn't it odd that this far into the information age we still have no word for information devices that consume power and perform work?] Think of these infotrons as fungible (economics speak for interchangeable) so they might start out as software but if someone can make a better one out of hardware it can just be swapped out. They are named, just as other elementary particles are, and have the same emergent properties as neutrons, electrons, and protons that come together to make molecules.
Back to our villager. She could make her product in her village fab lab from local materials and spare infotrons. It might start out hand made, and as she grows her business she may build in some 4D assembly to streamline manufacturing. Then she could publish the recipe as part of a worldwide "internet of manufacturing" information commons. Think of it as a physical "app store" combined with an ever growing "how things work" encyclopedia.
If a villager on the other side of the planet needs a similar solution he can download the recipe, use the substitution matrix to figure out what local materials and infotrons can be used to fab it, and start selling it on the other side of the world. Because this is a generative system, the original inventor gets a small royalty for her work. If the derivative work gets used to build something more rich and complex, both the original inventor and the one who built on top of it share value. These might be fractions of a penny for bits of capability. But just about anything multiplied by a trillion turns into a big number. Let’s call that “T-commerce.” It wouldn't be surprising if a developed economy stumbles on this sort of innovation, done under extreme constraints by smart villagers, and turns it into a billion dollar line of business (see the bookReverse Innovation for examples of the promise of this approach).
Through connectivity coupled with a generative framework of atoms and bits, that original villager soon has investment capital to uplift her community.
While developing economies may not have much in the way of tangible produced and exportable goods in the classic sense, every person, every community, every country is awash in insights from their natural human resources. Now if we could just harness that energy to power the turbines of T-commerce...