Fundamental Principles of Capitalism 2.0

Hamburg.
The next keynote speaker at next09 is Umair Haque from Havas Media Lab, who continues the theme by exploring what 'capitalism 2.0' might look like - his suggestion is that we're moving towards a new form of 'constructive capitalism', and that we need a capitalism where the costs of creative destruction are minimised, and the benefits maximised.

Today, the global growth in GDP has slowed drastically; there is a kind of 'zombieconomy' of old companies with obsolete business models which no longer manages to create value, but used to be core drivers of GDP. What this means is that corporate strategy as we know it is obsolete; instead, interaction between people is exploding, and this sits immediately at odds with the 'market are there to be dominated' approach of conventional industry.

As a result, we've entered an era of 'great compression' - the 'dumb growth' dynamic which was based on the old model is collapsing; yesterday's unsustainable value is collapsing,and capitalism 1.0 is eating itself. Value creation itself needs to be reconceived - we need to move to an approach in which business is not war, and people are no longer simply positioned as consumers. We need new rules of interaction to shape how we strategize and what we compete for.

The ideals of conventional capitalism have led to depletion, rigidity, conflict, stagnation, and nihilism. What we need to start aiming for instead are renewal (by embracing sustainable approaches), democracy (by employing crowdsourcing and user participation), peace (by seeing business not as war, but as principled competition, or even as collaboration - by being an ethical company, as Robert Fripp would say), equity (opening up new - possibly niche - markets rather than striving to dominate the old ones) and meaning (by making available the systems for users to compile useful information about the goods and services they access).

All up, this is a revolution in ideals, an institutional revolution, which will lead to a new form of capitalism.

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