The traditional economy in which physical goods are exchanged for money has caused us to focus on certain principles and laws, which however are not like laws of physics. Economics is a social science that deals with people, people who have needs and wishes, who make choices and decisions, who can make things and change things. The laws and principles of this social science can, have to, and do change. When attention for immaterial values like knowledge, information, ideas, experiences, etc., is growing, we have to critically reflect on the principles to see whether they fit this new situation.

Immaterial values function in a different way from material ones so different principles are needed. When you sell a car, you don’t possess that car anymore, but when you sell advice or some other type of immaterial value, you still have the knowledge on which you have based the advice yourself. Immaterial values are subject to so-called network externalities. Physical features become relatively less important, and issues like reputation, trust and integrity come to the fore. The Arthur Anderson case shows that when it lost its reputation, it lost everything. In the same way Microsoft had a reputation of stealing other people’s ideas so when someone had a great innovative idea, they took it elsewhere. In a time of democratized innovation as Von Hippel (2005) calls it, this can seriously damage the advantage a corporation has compared to its competition.

Organizations continue behind their walls. All organizations are part of society, part of a larger system so they have to take this larger system into account. Dynamics and complexity are part of everyday reality and should therefore be integrated into business tools and models. Organizations are not, they become. Organizations are not static entities but consist of relationships and flows. Tools and models that show a static snapshot of the situation of the past will not help in directing the organization towards the future in times of change, especially when the snapshot only shows the internal reality. Value chains that focus on the creation of value inside organizations are based on the production-line in traditional factories. Value is not created within organizations, value is instead realized in relationships, in the individual space as Zuboff and Maxmin (2002) have called it.

The flows and relationships do not just consist of exchanges of money and material values. Instead we should focus on the intangibles which according to Allee are the real sources of value. Who is sharing intangibles with whom and how should we organize around this sharing? What kinds of relations are present within the network? What kind of patterns emerge when you plot all the relations in an image? The sharing of intangibles crosses the boundaries of organizations so how can we support this process? Can we still judge the size of organizations by counting their employees in a time of organizations like Amazon, that has less than 2000 employees but that has an enormous amount of relationships with people outside that are doing work for them? If organizations are a part of a larger system and their success depends on the system, how useful are benchmarks (one of the myths Allee discusses in chapter 7 of The future of knowledge deals with this question)?

These are just some of the questions that are causing so many people around the globe to invest into the new principles of the economy. The definite answers are yet to be discovered, but we have been able to come up with laws and principles for the shift toward the industrial economy during the last centuries so the human mind will find a way to make sense of this shift too.

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