The Flicker Blog and Podcast

A dry and lengthy (but no less interesting) presentation by Verna Allee from the 2006 Mesh Forum on how the language of traditional economics is often innapropriate for understanding or explaining contemporary online business. We often hear of intangible assets; this presentation explains the need to quantify and measure them.

Economies are usually measured, valued or understood on the basis of trading finite resources. The information/attention/knowledge/etc. economy is hugely different. Put simply, knowledge multiplies when distributed – unlike a tangible product, it does not become scarcer.

Talking about traditional accounting practices, she highlights one of the major institutional and ideological conflicts that arise – to paraphrase:
The typical HR mantra: ‘People are our greatest asset.’
A typical accounting statement: ‘People are our biggest expense.’
If a business can’t agree on where it has value, how can it grow it?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 21st, 2006 at 4:05 am and is filed under Economics, Technology, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.