Distributed Enterprise Development

The approach to distributed enterprise development is uniquely different from centralized enterprise development.

The key players in any enterprise are funders and operators. In today's world, funders hold resources for rapid startup, and can be relevant both to a distributive or concentrative enterprise (ie, enterprises that tend to distribute vs concentrate wealth). In the distributive case, the enterprise could be a Distributive Enterprise.

In a centralized enterprise, certain stakeholders, possibly including funders - develop a product and typically actively or passively promote a non-collaborative, non-open-source process. The reward goes all to the centralized enterprise. Being non-collaborative, such a development typically does not improve equitable distribution of wealth as measured by the Gini Coefficient. The incentives for the centralized enterprise are market monopolization, a standard principle of scarcity economics. There is no risk share here - as no other parties are involved.

On the other hand, the Distributed Enterprise Development (DED) process focuses on collaboration. The collaboration could be between two - or more ideally - a bevy of independent collaborators. In the DED case, the incentive is risk share of development. All parties contribute equally to enterprise creation, and share both the risk and reward. A more equitable distribution of wealth is assumed, but only in the case of Distributed Market Substitution. Thus, a prerequisite for Distributive Enterprise Development is a large market size (billions to trillions), which applies to common goods and services. Distributive Enterprise Development applies best above the commodity level, meaning that commodities can be used as feedstocks, though localization and decommodification by diversified local production in circular economies would be the goal. GVCS tools assist in such a goal.

How to implement DED in the current economy? A practical approach may involve funders.

First, we should explain why the concept of top-down funders is problematic in a Distributive Economy - an economy marked by a priori distributive, rather than re-distributive, practices. Funders tend to promote concentration of wealth - as 'thems that gots, gets'. Ie, those who have a lot of wealth tend to accumulate more wealth, which in today's world means that many are left behind. According to the venture capital or IPO model of funding, money tends to accumulate in a few large players. The top-down investment model of getting a boatload of money inherently has limited validation of true value-creation - because of a built-in conflict of interest - or at best lack of a built-in feedback loop - between the funder and ethics. For this reason, it may be argued that the current top-down investment model, along with the very essence of Limited Liability - is part of Structural Evil.

Involving funders is risky from the perspective of determining ethical reward structures. How to determine how much value an investor should extract from an enterprise, if the only service that the investor provided was money? There is no justifiable answer to this question - it is an impossible question to which no good answer exists. That answer could be anywhere between 0 and 100% - and selecting the 'correct' answer up front is simply a gamble.

OSE does not believe in gambling, but it is possible to narrow that answer down to very near perfect accuracy - by involving investors in a different form of business logic. Take the case of a single investor, with whom OSE decides to collaborate. The investor invests in true open source product development -

Links

• Distributive Economy
• Distributive Enterprise