Good news: a research project I helped to write has been approved for funding by the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies program. The project is led by one of the scientists I admire the most, David Lane, and rests firmly in the complexity science tradition associated to the Santa Fe Institute. We intend to attack a big, fundamental problem: innovation is out of control. Humans invent to solve problems, but they end up creating new and scary ones. Which they tackle by innovating more, and the cycle repeats itself. Cars improve mobility, but they come with global warming and the urban sprawl. Hi tech agriculture mitigates food scarcity, but it also gives rise to the obesity epidemics. To quote one of our working documents:

While newly invented artifacts are designed, innovation as a process is emergent. It happens in the context of ongoing interaction between agents that attribute new meanings to existing things and highlight new needs to be satisfied by new things. This process displays a positive feedback [...] and is clearly not controlled by any one agent or restricted set of agents. As a consequence, the history of innovation is ripe with stories of completely unexpected turns. Some of these turns are toxic for humanity: phenomena like global warming or the obesity epidemics can be directly traced back to innovative activities. We try to address these phenomena by innovation, but we can’t control for more unintended consequences, perhaps even more lethal, stemming from this new innovation.

We want (1) build a solid theory that concatenates design end emergence in innovation and (2) use it to forge tools that the civil society can use to prevent the nefarious consequences of technical change. It does not get any bigger! And in fact we got a stellar evaluation: 4.5 out of 5 for technical and scientific excellence and 5 out of 5 for social impact.

The project commits to building Dragon Trainer, an online community management augmentation software. The idea is to make a science of the art of “training” online communities to do useful things (like policy evaluation), just as you would train an animal too large and strong to push around. I am responsible for producing Dragon Trainer, and it is quite a responsibility.

I am superhappy, but worried too. Taxpayers foot most of the bill, and this makes it even more imperative to produce the absolutely best result we can. I will need to work very, very hard. I am seriously thinking of devoting myself to full time research for a couple of years starting in 2012. Does this make sense? What do yo think?

Daniel Kaufmann had some fun compiling a list of the authoritative commentators that predicted that – unilke in Tunisia – in Egypt the disgruntled population would not take to the street, or anyway not in such a way to threaten the regime. Everybody seems to have fallen for it, from Foreign Policy to the BBC, from Time magazine to the Economist.

Forecasting was always tricky business, and is getting more so. In a society as complex as ours, even the best analyst are lousy at prediction. In an entirely different context, David Lane and others (yours truly included) are suggesting that in some cases prediction might be replaced by a system of early warning, that spots emergent social dynamics in its early stages, when correction is still possible. This would be done by combining and filtering large masses of data, many of which collected on the web. The idea — which might ring familiar to those who use the Internet as a social filtering device for information, is that the global conversation is an entity that exists at a level superior to ours, and as such might know things that none of us, mere participants, know.

To describe this hypothetical system, David likes to quote post-marketing surveillance on pharmaceuticals after the Thalidomide scandal. This drug used to be prescribed to pregnant women in the 1950s, and it could induce terrible deformities in newborn children, but only combining in exquisitely nonlinear ways with other agents: it was cleared for rollout because the lab tests did not allow to discover the problem. It was the doctors treating the mothers of deformed or sick children that discovered, in the ocean of statistical noise, the weak signal of taking Thalidomide during pregnancy. As a consequence of this story, pharmaceutical companies now work with physicians to spot correlations to weak to be spotted in the lab, but that might be revealed by processing the mass of data obtaiend by tapping all doctors.

It is a fascinating topic, at least for me. And — going back to Egypt — it leads to an unexpected conclusion: it suggests another way that Wikileaks might be a good thing. Laks feed the global conversation, and thereby increase the probability that bloggers, citizens and activists poolf their knowledge and discover emergent trends. It has been argued that Wikileaks is nefarious, because it might hinder the work of diplomacy: but without better analysis, diplomacy cannot do an acceptable job anyway.

According to David Lane, sometimes we need to make decisions in a condition that he calls of ontological uncertainty. That means we have no means of painting an exhaustive picture of the situation and of the full range of moves we can possibly make; and certainly we are unable to foresee the consequences of the few moves we can imagine. In a famous article, David asks us to consider the situaton of a Bosnian diplomat trying to bring an end to the bloodshed in his country in early September 1995:

It is very difficult to decide who are his friends and who his foes. First he fights against the Croats, then with them. His army struggles against an army composed of Bosnian Serbs, but his cousin and other Muslim dissidents fight alongside them. What can he expect from the UN securiy forces, from the NATO bombers, from Western politicians, from Belgrade and Zagreb, from Moscow? Who matters and what do they want? On whom can he rely, for what? He doesn’t know – and when he thinks he does, the next day it changes.

How to make decisions in such a situation? Answer: by telling yourself stories. Humans are good at storytelling: if you recognize yourself as the hero of a story, he will inspire your course of action, just like Don Quixote changed his life to model it in on medieval chivalry epics.

Innovation often happens in ontological uncertainty conditions. It is certainly possible to have a well defined goal in terms of producing an artefact, but the market system that depends on what people will use that artifact for – is always emergent. Movable type printing was a well-defined R&D project, but Gutenberg could not have forseen Aldus Manutius’s portable book and and the Umanesimo movement in Italy in the Renaissance; Henry Ford rationalized car production, but he could not have foreseen bedroom communities and mass commuting. To build and bring to market an innovation means acting in a changing context, like that of our Bosnian diplomat. And that requires storytelling.

Nadia El-Imam has come up with the idea to help people to tell stories about themselves and what they are doing with technology. She uses a special deck of tarot cards she designed herself (in lieu of the Hermit and the Magician she has arcana like the Server, the Developer and the Interface). Dressed up as a gypsy fortune teller, she offered to divine the future of the various geeks gathered at Mozilla Drumbeat in Barcelona. It was a roaring success, with a permanent queue of people waiting to interrogate her tarot. Among them, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Joi Ito (in the video). Engaging with Nadia and the cards, innovators make sense of what they are doing, and look for a way to complete their quests.

In their own unusual way, Nadia’s techno tarot are a platform, that lends itself to be used for collecting ethnographic data on innovation, for technology counseling and who knows for what else. I am quite curious to see how it all evolves.

One of my New Year resolutions for 2010 was “study complexity economics”. In my job as consultant on public policy I find myself facing problems that standard economics cannot even describe, let alone solve them. The complexity approach – a weird interdisciplinary mix of biology, computer science, neuroscience and various add-ons, from statistics to archaeology, with math holding everything together – could hold some of the answers.

It’s looking like I’ll get plenty of chances to study this stuff: I have become a Ph.D. candidate in Quantitative Economics at University of Alicante, in Spain, effective academic year 2010-2011. David Lane, member of the Science Board of the legendary Santa Fe Institute, and – less problems – I shall defend my thesis in the fall of 2012. My line of research is going to be quite practical: I want to figure out how to train social networks to execute some tasks. It’s networks, as opposed to people participating in them, I want to train.

This is more entangled than it seems. We more or less agree that social dynamics are emergent. Most interesting societal strucures, from Common Law to cultures and even the Mob are complex adaptive systems, and their behavior is impossible to predict in the long run. Not because we have bad models: in a complexity framework it is unpredictable even in principle

On the other hand, I have theorized (in Wikicrazia) and tried to practice (in Kublai and elsewhere) that we can and should harness collective intelligence to improve public policies and, ultimately, the world we live in. How to reconcile the unpredictability of social networks with the agency that public policy requires? I would like to explore the possibility of training social networks, through appropriate design choices and stimuli, as you would train some huge animal: using their superhuman information processing capacity to the advantage of humans. This means first and foremost understanding their mathematical structure and trying to influence it: it’s what Ruggero Rossi (another newly enrolled Alicante Ph.D. candidate) and I have started to do. Anyway, I’m going back to school: at 44 it is really a luxury, and a wonderful adventure. My thanks to Giovanni Ponti, the director of Alicante’s doctoral programme, for awarding me the most important and prestigious academic title: that of student.

There’s a lot of talk about innovation lately. A lot of people seem to regard it as some kind of religion: innovate, for innovation can save us. David Lane and Sander van der Leeuw, on the other hand, suspect that the innovation race of our present society might not be sustainable. They would like to discuss this intuition with the technological and social innovators: so they are giving a talk on Monday, September 27th at 11 a.m. at The Hub Milano, via Paolo Sarpi 8, and they are very curious to meet the Milanese technical and social innovators, and get their opinion on the matter.

David Lane looks at innovation as an economist. He is a member of the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute for the study of complex adaptive systems, which means his approach is very>/em> cross-disciplinary. He now teaches at the university of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Sander van der Leeuw looks at it as an archaelogist – which means his temporal perspective encompasses the last couple of million years, not so usual for innovation experts. He is now the Dean of the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University.

Do yourself a favour and show up. I heard David lecturing many times, and every time I’come out reeling for the intellectual overstimulation, but energized. I have not met Sander, but the video above is breathtaking. I’ll be there.

“Who are we going to ask for a preface?” When my publisher decided to release Wikicrazia he asked me this question, which I had manage to overlook completely. A journalist? Well, the big names tend to have care little and know less on such specialitic matters. A politician? They are by definition partisan, while I am very keen on maintaning my profile as a bipartisan advisor.

The solution we fund was a lateral move: there is no preface. It was replaced by short endorsements written by people who know me and whom I exchanged ideas with on the topic of public policies in the times of the Internet. I ended up collecting eight of them, from a true Legion of Superheroes of internet-enabled policies. I am very proud to parade their contributions on my book, and to be able to boast a little: wow, I actually hang out with these people! They are my colleagues!. In alphabetical order:

• Beth Simone Noveck. She teaches at New York School of Law and is the founder of Peer-to-Patent, the original 2.0 project of the U.S. federal administration. She is also the author of an excellent book on the topic, called Wiki Government, published in July 2009 as I was writing my own. I am sort of following in her trail!
• David Lane. American probabilist, he is a member of the Santa Fe Institute‘s Science Board. I mention often his thinking in this blog, because he is one the scientists I admire most, and I hope to be able to collaborate with him someday. He has been living and working in Italy for the past few years.
• David Osimo. He is a leading European expert on e-government 2.0. He worked for the European Commission, and has since moved on to start his own company in Brussels.
• Filippo Solibello. In Italy he is the most famous of the bunch: a radio and TV host, with whom I share an approach of looking at our country bringing to the foreground the things that work and the people who make them work, rather than concentrating on scandal-mongering.
• Gilda Farrell. She is the director of the Social Cohesion Research and Development division at the Council of Europe. She has a global outlook, and carries the flag of innovation in the public sector.
• Giulio Quaggiotto. He works at the World Bank in Washington D.C. His work is focused on the role of the private sector as an engine of economic development, and he is one of the authors of one of my favourite blogs
• Marco Magrassi. He comes from MIT, the Inter-American Development Bank and windsurfing. He now works in the Evaluation Unit at the Italian Ministry of Economic Development.
• Tito Bianchi. He, too, comes from MIT and works at the Evaluation Unit. He is also the man I answer to for Kublai, and my coauthor.

To all of them goes my most heartfelt THANK YOU. Up, up and away!

An unfinished version of this post was published by mistake to Google Reader a few weeks ago. If you’ve read it, please consider reading the finished version as well, it is substantially different – and better. My apology for the mess. The post can also be downloaded here.

Makers is a novel, published in 2009 by Canadian science fiction author and Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow. It deals with two entrepreneurs from the DIY scene (think MAKE Magazine, or Wired’s New Industrial Revolution), Perry Gibson and Lester Banks, inventing new things. Their inventions transform the world around them, not so much from a technical as from a social and economic point of view. They give rise to a highly decentralized organization and business model called “New Work” in the fictional context of the novel. I was referred to it by friends in the Italian physical hacking scene, which I started hanging out with in 2008.

When I first read the book I found it very prophetic, in the way that the best science fiction can be; also, I was stricken by how much of it translated pretty directly into widely accepted economic theory. After musing on it for about a year, I have become a convert (so much that I have participated in Arduino-based projects and started out experimenting with economic policy for makers). At the same time, though – in the context of some research that I am involved with – I have started to ask myself if the “innovation society” we seem to be trying to build (witness the Lisbon Strategy and innumerable policy documents) is indeed sustainable. Increasing quantities of innovation, after all, sort of implies the economy growing at an increasing rate, and this is likely to have straining side effects on the natural environment or even our own human limitations. Does innovation have a dark side? How much of can we take without descending into dystopia?

Doctorow has created a pretty believable fictional economy which seems to be, in some sense, the innovation society we are heading for. So I decided to study it more closely: that is, re-read the book with an economist’s eyes, to zero in on the economics of what’s going on in there.

Schumpeter’s creative destruction

The main economic engine in the world of Makers is Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction. It is laid out straight from chapter one by CEO Langdon Kettlewell in the press conference to announce the Kodak-Duracell merger:

Capitalism is eating itself. The market works, and when it works it commodifies or obsoletes everything.

At the end of the press conference, reporter Suzanne Church – who used to be an economic journalist in Detroit, and as such covered the demise of the car ecosystem – muses about being haunted by decay, even in the Silicon Valley, which was supposed to have incorporated failure as just a step on the road to ultimate success:

Now she was back in that old rustbelt funk, with the feeling that she was witness not to a beginning, but to a perpetual ending, a cycle of destruction that would tear down everything solid and reliable in the world.

Commodification and obsolescence, however, should be thought as a feature, not a bug. It is, in fact the way capitalism produces abundance. Tjan, the business manager Kodacell brings in to help Perry and Lester, is well aware of this:

So, if you want to make a big profit, you’ve got to start over again, invent something new, and milk it for all you can before the first imitator shows up. The more this happens, the better and cheaper everything gets. It’s how we got here, you see. It’s what the system is for.

Price wars and Bertrand equilibrium

The mechanism that drives the “destruction” part of creative destruction in Makers is cut-throat price competition. Innovative products are undercut by imitators, who scoop up the entire market thanks to lower prices. The process is iterated until the price reaches cost (including an acceptable remuneration of risk and capital):

In a good market, you invent something and charge all the market will bear for it. Someone else figures out how to do it cheaper, or decides they can do it for a slimmer margin [...] and so you have to drop your prices to compete. Then someone comes along who’s less greedy or more efficient than both of you and undercuts you again, and again and again, until eventually you get down to [...] a baseline that you can’t get lower than, the cheapest you can produce and stay in business.

This is Tjan speaking on his first night at the Perry – Lester venture. To an economist, he is giving a texbook rendition of Bertrand competition, a price war leading to a zero-profit equilibrium.

Unemployment and labor economics issues

Creative destruction rearranges production factors in the economic system, supposedly for the good. Unfortunately, some of these elements are people, and rearranging may involve a lot of pain, humiliation and fear. Doctorow embeds labour economics issues deep into the novel: the Kodacell press conference is interrupted by a protest of laid off staffers. Kettlewell’s first email to Suzanne asks the big question looming underneath Makers:

What happens when all the things you are good at are no good to anyone anymore?

Research initiated at the beginning of the current recession has cast doubts about the possibility to successfully mass-retrain a laid-off workforce to adjust to the changing needs of an innovation economy (New York Times). Labour supply seems still oriented to selling man-hours and expecting to be managed in a more or less traditionally Tayloristic way.

Brian Arthur’s building-block innovation

When Suzanne reaches Perry and Lester’s den to be shown what it is they do, Perry demonstrates their method to technical innovation. Basically, it consists of recombining existing technology in new ways. This is not only possible, but dirt cheap and fundamentally easy, because, in Perry’s words

Everywhere you look there’s devices for free that have everything you need to make anything do anything.

And Lester is even more concrete:

You know how they say a sculptor starts with a block of marble and chips away everything that doesn’t look like a statue? Like he can see the statue in the block? I get like that with garbage: I see the pieces on the heaps and in roadside trash, and I can just see how it can go together.

Makers subscribes to the complexity theory’ view on innovation, as discussed by John Holland, Brian Arthur and other researchers: making new things is (mostly) about finding new ways to recombine existing building blocks. Successful combinations become, in their turn, new blocks, so that an initially simple technology (the famous six simple machines of the ancient greeks) bootstraps to increasing levels of sophistication.

Open source and the speed of creative destruction

Perry and Lester’s ability to combine technological building blocks is greatly enhanced by the fact that anything important to them can be performed by open source technologies. This enables them to develop working prototypes from off-the-shelf equipment and software and put them into a manufacturing pipeline without worrying about licensing issues. This has two consequences: first, in the world of Makers ecosystems develop preferably around open source technology, because people like Perry and Lester have every incentive to route around proprietary technology; second, that the speed of the creative destruction cycle is greatly increased.

I think this may be the most important intuition Makers has to offer. Just think: we increasingly buy in ecosystem (Mac-iPhone-iPad-MobileMe, or Google-Android-Google Apps, or Linux-Apache-IBM’s proprietary web solutions); ecosystems grow faster if they can build on open source building blocks, so that the open source ones tend to outcompete the proprietary ones in the long run; but innovations in open source ecosystems are almost impossible to protect, and that lowers their average margin as the highly profitable grace period gets shorter. The solution, as Tjan suggests (see above) and most policy makers worldwides agree, is to increase the pace of innovation. This, however, raises the question of just how fast consumers can wrap their head around innovation: every heavy web user is familiar with the sensation that companies are putting out new services faster than we can absorb them, and sometimes we just have no time for them, no matter how cool they are. Google Wave, anyone? So, it could be that the destruction side of creative destruction prevails, landing the economy of Makers into a state of low margins and low growth, as more inventions fail to turn into more successful products on the market.

Becattini and Brusco’s competitive-cooperative manufacturing systems

Perry and Lester run a very small business unit (themselves and a few helpers), so their global competitiveness depends on the neutrality of unit costs with respect to production volume – in other words, no economies of scale. In fact Perry and Lester’s Florida junkyard is a scale-efficient production unit. In Tjan’s words

Every industry that required a factory yesterday requires a garage today.

Of course, it’s hard to get away from the fact that a lot of the cheapness in the system comes from exploiting economies of scale. The trick is that component manufacturing is scale-intensive, but the artifacts that Perry and Lester are interested in, being assemblies of such components, have a much lower minimum efficient production scale. In such a scenario, manufacturing systems most fit to compete are those that combine the agility of horizontal and vertical disintegration with low transaction costs, mutual trust and informational transparence. Vertical disintegration lets firms grow large where there are economies of scale to be exploited (components, silicon chips); horizontal disintegration enhances competition in the finished goods market (even though whichever manufacturers will win out in any given period of time will still buy components from the same handful of suppliers, therefore saving on the costs of reallocation of workers and manufacturing capacity); low transaction costs enable vertically disintegrated “manufacturing“ units like Perry and Lester’s (mostly R&D and business development, really) to build ad hoc networks of suppliers fast. In other words, New Work displays both tough competition and cooperation over and above formalized contracts.

Sebastiano Brusco and Giacomo Becattini’s model of industrial districts display just these characteristics (as, with different nuances, the work of researchers as Charles Sabel, Michael Piore and Annalee Saxenian). In Makers the low transaction costs part is implemented top-down through networked company Kodacell rather than, as in Brusco and Becattini, bottom-up through evolving conventions and reputation effects in a small territory, home to all the forms involved. So, when Lester invents Home Aware, an ecosystem can be summoned out of Kodacell’s decentralized “teams” structure. Tjan explains:

There are ten teams that do closet organizing in the network, and a bunch of shippers, packers, movers and storage experts. A few furniture companies. [...] The plan is to start our sales through the consultants at the same time as we start showing at trade shows for furniture companies.

The European Commission’s Living Lab

After a fire at a shantytown near the factory, Perry decides to let the inhabitants rebuild it on Kodacell premises (formerly a junkyard), which is largely unused. Kettlewell tries to get him to oust them. Perry holds his ground: he, Lester and Tjan had been meaning to invent something for the homeless people anyway.

We’ve built a living lab on our doorstep for exploring an enormous market opportunity to provide low-cost, sustainable technology for use by a substantial segment of the population who have no fixed address. There are millions of American squatters and billions of squatters worldwide. They have money to spend and no one else is trying to get it from them.

In the real word, Living Labs are a concept explored by the European Commission in the context of innovation policy. The idea is to replace consumer tests of new products with much larger scale, more realistic tests made possible a dense network of many actors collaborating on the same territory. Perry’s in-house shantytown would become a toy universe to model the squatters market: Kodacell can invent something and run a market test with limited costs and in a short time, but also real consumers spending real money. More importantly, it can recruit squatters themselves to participate in identifying needs and designing the products. And in fact it does: this is the role of the shantytown leader, Francis, who collaborates closely with Perry and Lester to think up new products.

Arrow’s Paradox and the value of invention

New Work’s downfall is heralded by an investor confidence crisis in Kodacell. Part of the problem is that analysts have a hard time figuring out how to value inventions, that are becoming an important part of Kodacell’s market value (the other part is inherent scarcity of genuine entrepreneurship). Kodacell ends up with a lot of novel products, with high returns on small projects. How many of these projects are going to scale to be large hits? Kettlewell:

Sure, if you looked at [our numbers] our way, they were great. If you looked at them the Street looks at them, we were in deep §#1t. Analysts couldn’t figure out how to value us.

This is yet another version of Kenneth Arrow’s famous paradox: markets for information typically don’t work well, because, in order to estimate precisely the value of something you need to know all about it. But information, of course, has no market value for you if you know it already. Invention is essentially information: until it is on the market and has climbed the diffusion curve, it is quite difficult to value it.

The New Work bust and the shift in consumer preferences

When part 2 of Makers opens, the New Work movement is over. A stock market bust has shattered the Kodacell business model, which had been promptly imitated by other large companies such as Westinghouse (who recruited Tjan off Kodacell). As a result, the movement is dead. Perry and Lester, still in their junkyard in Florida, start “the ride”, a sort of smart theme park-memorial of New Work, which is to be the subject of the rest of the book. The New Work fiasco is one of the least convincing parts of the book from an economist’s point of view: save for the aforementioned value of invention issue, it is hard to make out anything that would provoke more than a short-term market fluctuation. Kettlewell:

Analysts couldn’t figure out how to value us. Add a little market chaos and some old score-settling @##holes [...] and it’s a wonder we lasted as long as we did.

Even less convincing is the ensuing consumer disaffection for the goods that New Work had produced. In Perry’s words:

No one cares about invention anymore.

There is no obvious reason why this should happen. The second Perry-Lester invention, Home Aware, has been very successful, shipping a million units in six weeks. One would think that, even if the company originally producing it went bust, a competitor would step in to service and expand the existing customer base. After the 2000 dotcom bust consumers actually increased their use of the online services that they found useful, undaunted by their association with dotcoms. Yahoo, Google, Amazon and the like continued to prosper in their respective markets, if not in the stock market. I looked at time series data for NASDAQ and e-commerce sales over the period 1999-2009; the correlation between them is practically nonexistent (negative, in fact), as you can see from the following graph:

So, is the innovation society sustainable in Makers?

Sustainability questions are tricky. Time and again, scientists from have made doomsday predictions that went viral as public opinion found them really convincing, but later turned out to be way off the mark. From Malthus to the Club of Rome and the Millennium Bug, we seem to have a bias towards underestimating the adaptability of our society and its economy (cultural change makes the birth rate drop, raising prices of oil increase the energy efficiency of GDP and so on). Doomsday feels right at some level: it may just be a heritage of our Neolithic past, or a very deeply ingrained cultural myth (Apocalypse, Ragnarok etc.). Certainly that suggests a lot of caution in predicting it.

The economics of New Work are at least plausible; its downfall is the least plausible of its features. I was expecting something like Kodacell and Westinghouse spinning off their New Work branches, or selling them to more nimble, lower overhead companies that would commodify the networked organization and finance that the giant companies have to offer. The history of open source has already shown that you don’t really need a large company to achieve coordination, after all. The book, however, ends on a deeply pessimistic note: the large evil company has won the battle against the ride movement and recruited Lester, neutralizing his innovative potential; Perry has become a sort of wandering troubleshooter, lonely and poor. Doctorow the economist seems to be supportive of the innovation society, but Doctorow the author definitely is not. I wonder – really wonder – which if the two Doctorows will be right in the end.

Le mie riflessioni sull’economia dell’innovazione mi portano in questi giorni a pensare spesso a due persone che frequento in Second Life. Non siamo amici nel senso tradizionale del termine, anche se [disclaimer] io le sento entrambe amiche. Spesso chiacchieriamo, occasionalmente balliamo. Le ho incontrate in real life una volta ciascuna [fine disclaimer]. Entrambe hanno investito molte centinaia di ore nel costruire familiarità con il mezzo.

Roberta Greenfield è una celebrity di Second Life, una specie di dea iper-glamorous dal guardaroba sterminato. Oltre al look hollywoodiano (tra l’altro è Miss Italia SL 2007), ha l’agenda affollata di contatti e la fluidità relazionale della esperta pubblicitaria/PR che in effetti è. In quanto celebrity, la sua foto in home page fa impennare i contatti dei siti sulla SL italiana, e – data la sua fama di cacciatrice di tendenze – la sua presenza a un evento SL è una garanzia di prestigio, di qualità, attira i giornalisti.

Velas Lunasea è un’infrastruttura sociale in un solo avatar. Ha addestrato ad un uso consapevole di SL qualcosa come settanta persone, tra cui praticamente tutti i conferenzieri dell’unAcademy, quindi il gotha del digitale italiano. Sembra conoscere tutti, e tutte le land. Anima delle feste, alle abilità relazionali unisce slanci tipo questo, che ha portato l’onda dell’iniziativa “bloggers per il 25 aprile” ad aprire un fronte su SL; e si è costruita una solida rete di rapporti di stima con alcuni dei creativi più interessanti della SL italiani. Questa rete è di qualità così alta che è stata in grado di costruire un gruppo di lavoro (non pagato) per mettere in piedi una cosa sofisticata come il Museo delle mondine in SL – in dieci giorni dalla prima idea al lavoro finito. In RL fa la commercialista.

Io penso che Roberta e Velas siano fattori di innovazione e di sviluppo. Per riconoscerle come tali ho dovuto immergermi profondamente nel brave new world dell’internet sociale: nell’economia che ho studiato non c’è nulla di nemmeno vagamente simile a loro. E invece, mi sa, dovrebbe esserci. Il loro contributo a Kublai, per esempio, è già evidente. I loro avatar sono araldi di una nuova fase nel pensiero economico, in cui i vecchi modelli (poche variabili e una matematica semplice e elegante per derivare stati del mondo) non avranno nessuna utilità per chi, come me, lavora sul campo. Già da qualche anno i modelli che uso sono multistrato e multisoggetto, pieni di riferimenti al tempo (una stessa mossa può essere utile in un dato momento e dannosa se un po’ prima o un po’ dopo), al sequencing (cosa deve venire prima, cosa dopo), agli aspetti cognitivi. Strani e complessi sono diventati anche i miei strumenti di lavoro, che includono happy hours, feste, blog, video.

Naturalmente va evitata la sovraesposizione della pratica e del cool effect. Un solido retroterra teorico e una tensione implacabile al rigore continuano a essere indispensabili. Mi preparo a fare la mia piccola parte nella madre di tutte le sfide, quella per rinnovare lo sguardo sul mondo della scienza economica. Che forse, a forza di frequentare gente come Roberta e Velas, diventerà un po’ meno “scienza triste”.