Business Innovation and Global Consciousness

Q: What are the major implications of globalization for business today, and how should companies respond innovatively to opportunities in the emerging world market?

A: Globalization is reshaping the world in unimaginable ways: massive economic, environmental and cultural shifts are being wrought by the accelerating interaction and meshing of economies and societies. This much we know.

What is less recognized is that globalization is transforming human consciousness: we are progressively developing a shared awareness of the entire world and of ourselves as integrated human beings, unified in our diversity. This requires that cultural entrepreneurs both foster their creative skills and develop innovative business models to anticipate the new market opportunities of a global consciousness. In our work for a wide range of entrepreneurial and corporate clients at Pompei A.D., the elements of commerce, culture and community are merged and inseparable. This is the basis of our marketplace advantage.

Co-Creation and Transformation

As unique societies around the world connect and blend to create new hybrids and syntheses, innovation has accelerated to the point where it has itself become the dominant mode of cultural transmission. All forms of work and leisure - from subsistence farming to call centers, from music to movies - are being dramatically altered. The hierarchy of commercial and cultural offerings available today is evolving rapidly. It stretches from commodities to products, products to services, services to experiences and finally experiences to transformations.

Transformations are commercial, cultural and social offerings that shift the structure of our knowledge towards integration. For example, while a doctor may restore someone's health through surgery - i.e. perform a vital service - someone else may give that person the information about cause and effect that restores their health and leads them to change their lifestyle - i.e. transform how they feel about life. Among the hierarchy of offerings, transformations are certainly the most highly valued because the process of self-actualization and the primacy of authentic expression are at the core of the emerging global consciousness. As we begin to understand ourselves as complex beings involved in a lifelong process of co-creating our own evolution and cultural transformation, new opportunities for radical approaches to commerce unfold.

Cooperation and Competition

The level of social, economic and environmental integration that will resonate with a global consciousness can be achieved through expanding the innovative capacity of business. We have to exercise our inherent creativity to anticipate the future and replace past patterns that are useless today. In the words of Albert Einstein, "The world we have created today, as a result of our thinking thus far, has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them." Purely rational approaches relying on data lead us to view the future through the lens of the known; today we need our creative antennae to guide us through the unknown.

Some of the new business models that globalization is giving rise to - such as "open source" software development, which draws on the capabilities of a worldwide network of experts to build excellent products; microfinance, which makes essential capital available to the very poor and has profitable, higher repayment rates than conventional loans; and emissions trading and development projects to meet the goals of the Kyoto Protocol - are disruptive to established industries while also creating new kinds of opportunity for innovative businesses.

Challenges such as trade barriers, intellectual property rights, outsourcing, counterfeiting, security, infectious diseases, access to natural resources, climate change and lack of shelter and healthy food, are beyond the capacity of a single organization and country to address. This is why one of the most important and useful characteristics of the emerging culture and economy is cooperation. In humans, cooperation is a highly developed skill, due to our capacity for abstract thought, our ability to empathize and our wide range of communication modes. Cooperation holds the promise of transformation as we evolve toward a higher order of integrated, collective awareness. And while competition - even cut-throat competition - exists, it is something Darwin never meant when he wrote of "survival of the fittest." His phrase referred to appropriate adaptation to environment, or "fit," in which different species and members of species also collaborate to mutual advantage.

Interdependence

This misreading of Darwin fits neatly with the rational legacy of the 18th Century Enlightenment that has been the motor of development and human "progress" for over two and a half centuries. While an emphasis on rational analysis has led to an increasingly fragmented, atomized view of the world and of ourselves, we have since learned from quantum physics and microbiology that nothing we do is separate from our environment, and that we are constantly influenced even by distant events. We are interdependent with the womb of atmosphere and biosphere that we inhabit, and, while robust, both we and the environment are not infinitely adaptable.

With this growing recognition of the interdependence of everything, "Biomimicry," is taking root in a wide range of disciplines, from chemistry and agriculture to engineering, architecture and business. The term refers to an approach that imitates models from nature to devise innovative solutions based on resiliency and redundancy - common characteristics of all natural systems. For example, the mother of pearl coating of Abalone shells has a crystalline structure which self-assembles precisely and is tougher than any artificial product. If we could replicate this structure, we would have environmentally safe, hard coatings that are both fracture resistant and lightweight. Biomimicry is superior to the economic minimalism and efficiency that characterize modern technology because it generates durable solutions with a positive impact on the natural environment. At the same time, conventional scientific innovation in other fields such as nanotechnology is dramatically altering the frontiers of what it was once possible to design. New carbon-based atomic microstructures possess unique physical properties that are still only dimly understood and yet already hold immense potential for the development of new solutions from medicine to microchips. Biomimicry and nanotechnology are examples of an innovative approach, and a new technology, respectively, that will need complementary, innovative business models in order to realize their full potential.

Invent the Future

The rising tide of information that we face continues to sweep us forward, and cannot be assimilated by purely rational means. While companies can - and must - increasingly play an editorial and curatorial role to filter what is relevant, we have to balance both sides of our brains to be able to sift through vast amounts of multimedia information intuitively and therefore rapidly. "The MFA is the new MBA" could be the mantra of our time. More accurately, the creative and the analytic capacities of our minds must complement each other. As Buckminster Fuller put it, we all need to become a "synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist."

Alan Kay said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Globalization is fundamentally about the possibilities arising from a collective awareness of all cultures. We have the collective capacity now to invent the future as we develop a broader, growing awareness of the inherent potential of our time, within our diverse cultures. Cultural entrepreneurs, who necessarily integrate commerce, culture and community, move our awareness closer to the transformative process that is our innate being and our reality.

Companies that understand the present shift to global consciousness and their own potential for innovation will thrive and will create the future.