Distributed Enterprise Development
The approach to distributed enterprise development is uniquely different from centralized enterprise development, or what we know as business-as-usual.
The key players in any enterprise are generally speaking 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, for example, a Distributive Enterprise.
In a centralized enterprise, certain stakeholders, 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. This makes a lot of sense in the framework of a scarcity-based economy.
On the other hand, the Distributed Enterprise Development (DED) process focuses on collaboration. The collaboration could be between two - or idaelly more - 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 (DMS). Thus, a prerequisite for Distributive Enterprise Development is a large market size (billions to trillions), which applies to common goods and services. Thus, a case can be made that an investor would be interested. This may be difficult, because a typical investor will not think that DMS is possible. If the market is already established, how to disrupt it? That's a hard sell for common goods and services. Thus, the solution to the DMS must be transcendent. How to create a product that beats the competion out of the water?
From the OSE perspective, the answer is simple, though execution remains to be proven. The answer could be adding one or more transcendent features - which society may or may not yet appreciate. Such as producing a good with lifetime design. Such as a cordless drill that lasts for ever instead of 3 years, thereby adding 10x value. Or a good that is produced in the circular economy, or a good that uses a different business model (such as Uber did). Or a good that relies on innovative import substitution, such as using local recycled plastic vs virgin plastic. Or a good that relies on unprecedented integration (such as a fully automated aquaponic greenhouse for households that provides most food needs of a family). Or a local steel mill that is pollution free. Or a local PV manufacturing facility that provides solar power for every household. Or a local hydrogen economy that displaces the fossil fuel economy. Or a local solar eco-concrete plant that does not pollute the environment. Or a local car production company that makes lifetime design hydrogen-powered cars, and car junkyards disappear by virtue of local capacity and interchangeable parts. Any big trouble-spot of today can be displaced by an ethical counterpart - but these are all moonshots that require collaboration, not business-as-usual.
It is exactly these moonshots that DED is aimed for.
Distributive Enterprise Development may apply best above the commodity level, meaning that commodities can be used as feedstocks, though localization and decommodification by diversified, open source, local production in circular economies and microfactories 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 ethical behavior. 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 between stakeholders. How to determine how much value an investor should extract from an enterprise, and how much is given to people who do the actual work, 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 OSE and a single investor, with whom OSE decides to collaborate based on shared vision of transcendent goals. The investor invests in true open source product development - and the investor has the option to run the enterprise in their location, while OSE runs it in theirs. If more groups in different locations are involved - the better. Then we can take on moonshots, such as producing lifetime design hydrogen cars, locally - and eradicating oil wars and related geopolitics in the process.
The model addresses the question of OSE and investors. Typically, we may think that the investor would invest in the operation on the OSE premises. That would not be accountable. We should run our own operation, and the investor runs theirs. That way, we have addressed the question of OSE revenue share from the OSE operation perfectly: zero. How is the investor motivated? By getting a return from their operation. This sounds like a fair route to collaboration via Glocalization. What value does OSE offer? OSE offers the technology, quality control, open source production engineering, and collaborative development for improving the technology via means such as Incentive Challenges, Extreme Builds, and STEAM Camps.
The question remains - can we motivate investors to take on this challenge, for example for producing 3D Printers? A local parts production business? Or tractors? Or CNC torch tables? Or houses? It depends on the investor.
What would a business plan for an open source microfactory look like here?
Assets required: Business Plan, Product Strategy, Production Engineering, Quality Control, Sales, Marketing, HR, Operations, IT Business Plan, R&D.
Summary: The simple idea of an investor investing in their own operation, while leveraging OSE's technology, is a sound way to do Distributed Enterprise Development. The requirement would have to be that the investor understands abundance, and they are willing to entertain that honest improvement of their local community is the fruit of their work - by providing goods and services to their local community. Now, let's take the Basic Microfactory (3DP, CNC torch, CNC Machine Center, Circuit Plotter) and deliver the first implementation of the Open Source Everything Store, with a business model of store-front, online sales, STEAM Camps, Startup Camps, Incentive Challenges, and other products.
