Over the last twenty-five years, there have been a number of overlapping descriptors of the economic systems in which businesses live. Regional and global economies have moved through the Industrial, Informational and Knowledge Economies to the Network, and now into the Creative Economy. All of these shifts have been rapid and each has incorporated and built upon – but certainly not eliminated – the previous ones.

So begins a Shift Paper that Tomorrow Makers published earlier this year in preparation for our workshops at Davos and which has drawn considerable interest and engagement since. Though we published it as a pdf, we realize it becomes much more useful as a living document, with which to engage our collective thinking...

This shift paper is written not as a wrong way/right way to think about and do business, but rather as a way to have a dialog about our assumptions and ways of working in order to increase our fitness for the kinds of situations, decisions and responsibilities that a Creative Economy imposes on us.

In this spirit, we thought it would be fun to list the "emerging patterns" of organization we identified in the shift paper, using them as a source from which to link to ideas, conversations, illustrations and other examples of these patterns in the world around us. Some of these may be familar to you, but hopefully we've uncovered a few new discoveries, as well.

sm14.07.jpg Tucked near the back of the July issue of Wired, there is an article about two types, or classifications, of creative genius: conceptual and experimental. The article focuses on the research findings of David Galenson, who in 1997 "almost by accident" happened upon an observation which turned to curiosity turned to hypothesis and ultimately into theory. The creative class of conceptualists figure out what they want to create before they set out to create it. "The hallmark of conceptualists is certainty. They know what they want. And they know when they've created it." The vast majority of conceptualist geniuses, according to Galenson's research, peak at a relatively early age or stage in their careers, most often twenty- or thirty-somethings. Experimentalists are tinkerers, forever approaching a realization of an idea, never quite knowing when their work is finished. Coming to knowing rather than knowing. They are typically late-bloomers, producing their best work after years of playing with ideas, tinkering, toying, tweaking.

Is it possible to think of organizations, communities and even civilizations in these terms?

Journal

Shifting to a Creative Economy

Kind of Genius

Tomorrow Makers