A road to growth and wealth
Work is hard, we work endless work hours, endure mad traffic and still do not make enough to survive, let alone flex.
I believe we can do better, I believe we can work smarter and more in tune with how we live and how the world is changing.
The world is becoming more and more digital, people from different places and times are meeting themselves instantly regardless of barriers within a few clicks. These distributed digital systems are helping us build new connections.
But work, wealth creation (or making money and other forms of wealth) and growing as an individual or a community, is still happening the same old way. A few places and people are doing it differently, like platform cooperatives, tech startups and open source projects, but there isn’t a clearly defined process to follow or take for anyone to follow, learn from and build from.
So how can we fix this? How can we help people create, build and find new ways of working, earning and growing?
We can try the old copy and paste method, by looking at those doing it well, to copy from them and reapply it elsewhere.
We’ve seen startups as an entity work beautifully, scale, make so much money and grow so well. Although the wealth and success generated from the startups usually go to one, 3 or a small group of individuals in a community, still wealth and growth happens in a scalable way that has been replicated multiple times.
We’ve also seen individuals in small communities come together willingly, to build solutions to their problems in an open way, such that they work from different places in the world in a distributed and asynchronous manner, at their own pace and time, but still churn out way more innovations than full grown businesses with 1,000 hires. These solutions built openly have been called open source projects/products/software.
So how can we take this process of growth and wealth creation from startups in communities, and the innovative way of working from open source projects and their communities, to fix the way we currently work, create wealth (make money) and grow in our current world?
Like I mentioned earlier, just copy the damn processes from these 2 worlds and reapply them in our world!
Let me explain below.
For startups, they leverage different processes like Design Thinking, Agile Methodologies, Business Model Canvas to create businesses and solutions to painful problems. These processes detail the mental steps different individuals and institutions have used to innovate and create. The processes are the ways these individuals and institutions think about work, and this influences the way they work. The processes are their mental models for work.
For open source projects, they build together and freely with their communities contributing freely and openly. They build from the community.
Through research and practical trials, we realised open online communities can be shown how to go through these processes. When they do, they become a new type of community. They become a community that is a market, a startup, an economy and an ecosystem. The community transforms or evolves and it all happens online.
With this continuous loop of learning, creating, building, growing and contributing back, an ecosystem of life creation, growth and translation, is formed, thereby putting in place all that makes a Nation or a Country from a system point of view. This Nation is built off a digital community, a digital economy and a digital ecosystem, thus making it a digital, a Digital Nation.
If we properly package the process or system or protocol applied above, it becomes a combination of mental models or thinking frameworks, the local digital community and smart-content. We call it The Growth and Innovation Protocol/System.
A visual overview of the Growth and Innovation Protocol/System
A visual in-depth explainer of the Growth and Innovation Protocol/System
A visual representation of how problems pass through the Growth and Innovation Protocol/System to become solutions