May I Have Your Attention?

A year or so ago, I wrote about momentary advantages in business. There's a new frame of reference for value creation that demands creativity, flexibility, and execution. Ideascape makes it easier for your employees to cut through the clutter of information and prevent the frittering away of valuable resources; ie, their time and attention -- mindspace, and re-focus them on making ideas more robust, and useful across the business.

John Hagel does a better job at explaining the "Attention Economy" concept that I was trying to get my head around in the above piece.

Goldhaber and Attention Economy from edge perspective, John Hagel, "It is one of the key reasons that customers are gaining more power in global markets - they own the scarce resource that will ultimately determine who creates value and who destroys value. We are accustomed to analyzing business performance in terms of return on assets but, if one understands the implications of Goldhaber's insight, executives will need to focus on a new form of ROA instead - return on attention. Instead of looking at market share, we will be looking at share of attention (of individual customers) and share of wallet (again, of individual customers)."

So, how are things changing?

From the feature.com, Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs (blog), "...colleagues Andrea Saveri and Kathi Vian, I've put together a report (PDF) and visual map of technologies of cooperation for publication by our sponsor, the Institute for the Future. Taken together with Mobile and Open: A Manifesto, this report and accompanying graphic map are offered as resources to the developers, designers, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, operators, service providers and activists who seek to use these new tools to alleviate suffering, create wealth, educate, liberate, create and inform."

"These emerging digital technologies present new opportunities to change the way people work together to solve problems and generate wealth."

Endless possibilities - In the new millennium, yesterday's Employees have been replaced with today's Professionals - they need uncluttered information, both internal †regarding the company, and external - regarding the competition, trends in the industry, etc - to solve problems, meet challenges, and do their jobs. The conundrum is that today's Professional needs help with ideas and information yet has no mindspace (time and attention) to sift though the clutter.

Ideas are everywhere - use Ideascape to find and discover them.

Many thanks to Francois from blogbridge for the heads up on the Rheingold post.