The Future 500: The New Economy
The World is Between Economies
...between a 300-year-old industrial economy that multiplies human muscle, and an emerging knowledge-based economy that expands the human mind.
The Industrial Economy
used machines to transform "hard" resources -- coal, steel and oil -- into products. The faster the machines operated, the more resources were consumed, and the more wealth was created.
In a simple industrial ecosystem like that, every institution was shaped to serve that consumption imperative. Economies of scale turned the economy itself into a virtual machine. Standardized products were made in standardized factories, by standardized employees, working standard 40 hour weeks for standardized companies -- Standard Oil, General Motors, Standard Brands, General Electric -- and sold to a standardized mass market of consumers with standardized tastes.
The positive social impacts of the machine age were extraordinary: higher living standards, greater health, longer life, educational opportunities, technological advance.
But the industrial economy faced natural limits. By basing growth on physical consumption, it set the economy and environment at odds. Whatever we gave to the economy -- a barrel of oil, a ton of ore, a tree -- we took from the environment.
In the 1960s those limits began to catch up to us. In 1974 they came forcefully into view. the Arab oil embargo sent price increase shock waves streaming through the economy, triggering thousands of pent-up technical innovations and systems changes and product refinements that dramatically reduced our need for the resource most constrained.
Traditional industries at first were hit hard. But a new economy began to more fully emerge: the knowledge economy. By the end of the 1980s, knowledge had displaced matter as the chief catalyst to growth. Efficiency had emerged as our largest or second-largest source of energy and resources. "Negawatts" and "immaterials" supplied nearly a third of all our resource needs. And businesses began to reshape themselves to conform with the new imperative: not consumption, but learning.
The Emerging Economy
profits by using "soft" resources: Knowledge. Design. Systems. It taps the knowledge of people, and embeds that knowledge into products and processes.
To maximize profits in the new economy, business must maximize the creation and use of knowledge. That is why virtually every dominant institution of the industrial age is undergoing profound transformation. Corporations, governments, unions, and non-profits are being downsized, right-sized, reengineered, and reinvented. All to look less like the top-down, hierarchical machines of the industrial age, and more like the living systems of the new economy.
How can organizations reinvent themselves to maximize gain in the new economy?
One Powerful Method is Industrial Ecology
Ecosystems are the supreme learning organizations. Using finite resources, they operate sustainably, according to simple principles that create extraordinary abundance.
These principles of advanced productivity are not reserve to nature alone. Industrial Ecology applies the same principles to business, showing how to leverage small amounts of physical resources into tremendous creativity, productivity, and profit.
Industrial Ecology is more than a corporate environmental program. It is a system that uses incentives and feedback loops to speed the pace by which companies adapt to changing conditions. The tools of Industrial Ecology can be applied in management, accounting, product development, environmental affairs, and throughout businesses, to:
- Drive Costs Down
- Drive Creativity Up
- Enhance Responsiveness, Resilience, Sustainability, and Profitability
- Create Value, not just move it or add it
- Industrial Ecology is the art and science of the learning organization. It can help any company make the leap to new economy.
Industrial Ecology Concepts
- Industrial Ecology
- Design for Environment
- Activity-Based Costing
- Waste = Food
- Dematerialization
- Knowledge = Capital
- Learning Organizations
- Enemy = Teacher
- Eco-Industrial Parks
- Permaculture
- Factor Four
- Rescue Productivity
- Industrial Metabolism
- Sustainable Building
- Scenario Planning
- Natural Factories
- Life Cycle
- TQM
- The Natural Step
- Systems Thinking
Commenti wolud like you to send me materails on industrailization & Economy development in core industrial countries in the world
CommentI think you are comprehensive, and up till date. But you have to do some more work, by trying to up load som more examples where this can be used effectively and efficiently.
Future 500's stakeholder engagement methodology is based on feedback and adaptation. In this spirit, we encourage you -- our stakeholders -- to share your ideas below.
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