The Ideabox Blog

Yes, it is taking a bit longer than anticipated, but babies are very comfortable in the wombs of mothers who spoil them. 

Or something.

TIB 2.o alpha is debuting this weekend. We’ll send out an email. 

It won’t be perfect, but it should give a clear idea of who we are, what we can/want to do, etc etc. People will be able to register w/us, submit projects for incubation, and browse all listed projects.

Still a lot of work to do, but we’re excited about it. We hope you are too. As always, we welcome your suggestions.

Get ready to say goodbye to the wordpressness.

In honor of this historic day, I’d like to briefly point out how CEI plugs into President-Elect Obama’s conception of America’s next phase. 

I described in earlier posts how the rejuvenation of the country would be America’s new meta-narrative. Obama’s landslide election can be interpreted in many ways, but I think one of the most profound implications is that the age of 9/11 politics (of fear), while never to be forgotten, is done. America is moving on. Fueled by two wars, an inability or unwillingness to engage our enemies diplomatically, and lots of talk of the need for patriotism in a dangerous world, fear and uncertainty have dominated our political landscape since 9/11. For a long time this atmosphere favored the Republicans.

No longer. We are turning the corner. Having needed a perfect storm of crises to realize the enormity of the challenges facing us at home and abroad, Americans are slowly moving past a debilitating and exaggerated culture war and worrying about common challenges. Among the many uphill battles we face, we’ll be hearing a lot about “rebuilding America’s infrastructure”. This refers, most obviously, to the physical infrastructure—highways, railways, the electric grid, green energy—that is perhaps best represented by the idea for a National Infrastructure Bank and other public-private partnerships (PPPs). Less obvious but equally important is a massive reinvestment in our social infrastructure: especially schools and urban communities.

There has been much commentary about the individual aspects that can be categorized under the “social infrastructure” umbrella, but not much use of the term itself. I think it’s a simple way to understand the nature of the assorted cultural and social challenges we face, many of which are intangible and difficult to quantify. Using the infrastructure terminology allows those bundled problems to be presented neatly alongside the physical infrastructural improvements we need to make, and understood as a yin-yanged whole.

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The last post toyed with the idea of understanding “spreading the wealth” in a slightly new way, in the context of a certain cultural shift that is emerging in the US in particular. I didn’t talk about changing the culture/conception of capitalism per se. Now I’ll make that connection.

The ideas I alluded to before—spreading the wealth, using (mostly) the private sector (philanthropy, venture capital, wealthy individuals) to spur localized community building programs—already implied a new conception/understanding of the interrelated roles of capitalism and government in shaping the state. Let’s take these notions, and the cultural context of the financial crisis and American rejuvenation, a step further.

Capitalism is now taking a big hit around the world—literally in the markets and figuratively in reputation. Americans, the engineers of modern capitalism such that it is now known abroad as American capitalism,  were always its biggest fans. Some fast developing 2^nd world countries, as well as most of Eastern Europe (now mostly 1^st world), have taken to the miracles of this system as well. The same cannot quite be said for the rest of the world. They tolerated it, benefited from it, and accepted it as the best of all economic systems—and logically so. But the vestiges of “socialism” remain in Europe, Australia/NZ, and across the rest of the developed and undeveloped world (and even in E. Europe, party lines divide roughly along interpretations of capitalism, “American” vs “European”). These countries have held stronger to socialist relics like universal health care and pension systems (even if they failed to achieve them). So we see in practice there a slightly different practice of capitalism, known as social democracy. We’re all familiar with the classic “US vs Europe” debate about economic regulation and government’s role in guaranteeing basic human rights like access to medical care. Or maybe they’re not basic human rights. Or maybe it all should be privatized? Etc. Even in America, “American capitalism” is a highly contested notion.

The point is that, as a result of the financial crisis and the Bush Administration and the performance our financial ecosystem over the last 25+ yrs in general, we in the US are now positioned to tinker with our capitalism in a big way.

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Every now and then it slips that the father of market capitalism thought spreading the wealth via government policy wasn’t such a terrible idea. 

Andrew Sullivan quoting Adam Smith:

It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion. 

Still lamentable, according to Sullivan, but that’s not the point here. The point is that a thriving philanthropic-based redistribution of wealth involving direct private investment in well-conceived, well-executed local community-buidling programs is just another way to spread the wealth. In fact, more than just another way, you could make a strong argument—to conservatives especially—that it’s actually a smarter way to address community building. 

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One of the biggest challenges in improving TIB’s bizplan, rather than solving operational challenges, is to simplify it. We’ve encountered three strategic hurdles:

1. TIB is a unique entity, and one that has multiple purposes and operations; hence, beyond the description of “pioneer for the CEI industry”, it is hard to explain the organic relationship between each of TIB’s arms. (Of course, that makes it all the more crucial to outline them specifically!)

2. TIB exists within an industry, SE, that is itself ill-defined, nascent, and evolving.

3. While TIB’s mission and most of its functions are clear to us, some questions remain unanswered. Otherwise put, TIB has evolved over time toward the magic balance between market demand, useful service, compelling brand, and operational problemsolving. It will surely evolve some more—hence TIBB.

Now that TIBB is up and running in Alpha, we are taking a hatchet (and a scalpel) to the BizPlan in an attempt to be simpler and clearer.

I can’t help but think back to Scott Belsky’s presentation at The Feast last Thursday. Scott’s company, Behance, makes ideas happen—on every level from strategy to stationery. His talk detailed Behance’s Action Method, which is a brilliantly simple way to approach brainstorming/communication/development such that an idea actually results in something. Given that TIB’s mission is “from dreaming to doing”, this strategy is of great interest to us. Scott spoke of how to best harness productivity among the team, how to roll with some ideas and leave others on the backburner, and why sharing ideas before they’re “ready” is more helpful than hurtful (we really liked that idea!). 

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