The Economy of Abundance
Chris Anderson, purveyor of the Long Tail, has been heard discussing the related concept of the Abundance Economy. While I would love to provide you with a succinct definition, but David Hornick has done a very nice job already:
The Economy of Abundance allows business owners to defer choices to the end users. What better way to find out what consumers want than to give them everything and see what they actually buy. That is the paradigm of abundance. Why get your news programmed by CNN.com when you
can have your news bubble up from the collective wisdom of end users at Newsvine or Reddit? Why get your television programmed by CBS when you can leverage the collective wisdom of the web to find great shows like Lonelygirl15 or Ask a Ninja?
No longer will the success or failure of content be dictated solely by the Economy of Scarcity (e.g. Walmart). Rather, it will be dictated by the will of the consumers, as empowered by the Economy of Abundance.Much like the Long Tail, the idea of the Economy of Abundance is not prescriptive. It does not tell you how to run your business. But it points to another significant force at work in the new economy and suggests that entrepreneurs should think creatively about how their businesses might be transformed by utilizing abundant resources in a disruptive way. Like the Long Tail before it, I suspect that I will be seeing the Economy of Abundance permeate the presentations that I see in the coming months and year.
Source: VentureBlog, "Chris Anderson Strikes Again: The Economy of Abundance"
This ties in, of course, to the crowdsourcing theme started yesterday that all data needs to be transmuted into information before it is truly useful. In this abundance-driven model, it seems quite reasonable that we are increasingly forced to deal with depleted reserves of attention.
Perhaps the scarcity Anderson says ruled the world has simply been re-assigned to our own attention engines?
technorati tags:longtail, scarcity, abundance, chris+anderson, david+hornick