Mobilizing Intangibles under the Acceluction Regime

Abstract

The way value is created is deeply influenced by two major transformational phenomena: (1) the emergence of intangibles as a main source of value creation and (2) the emergence of digital as a deep transformational phenomenon. Taking this as a starting point, the paper underlines the need to better characterize the emerging value production system. By reference to a large international research program (ISD) I coordinated, I coined the term acceluction as an umbrella concept to characterize such a production system. Compared to previous production systems, such as the lean, value is now created by accelerated production of links (acceluction). The acceluction regime is defined in its key dimensions: content, value spaces, the role of intangibles and the governance mechanisms, with a specific focus on platforms.

This chapter draws upon content from my book Digital Futures, Digital Transformation, from Lean Production to Acceluction, published by Springer (notably Chapters 4 and 5). It also builds on my discussions with participants at the Knowledge and Space International Symposium on Professions and Proficiency, organized by Professor Johannes Glückler, Heidelberg University, Klaus Tschira Foundation, Villa Bosch, Heidelberg on July 26–28, 2019. I am very grateful to Professor Glückler for his invitation, and the opportunity to engage in a stimulating dialogue with leading experts, at such a wonderful venue.

Intangibles, including hard intangibles such as intellectual property rights (IPRs), are important sources of growth and innovation in any context (Bounfour, 2003; Bounfour & Miyagawa, 2005; OECD, 2013; The World Bank, 2006). Intangibles represent the main components of performance for firms and ecosystems: R & D, innovation, competences, data, processes, brands, reputation, trust, brands, patents, copyrights, among others. They are important ingredients in transactions and socio-economizing, for example, in the way production and innovation systems are organized. In the business sphere, the epistemic view has been—and is still—built on an organizational setting that is relatively stable in space and time (the firm). But new challenges and new production systems are emerging; in these new systems, society is no longer a target, but is more a resource and a key player for innovation. In the specific case of IPRs, we need to understand their role, contribution, and evolution under emerging production regimes.

Several arguments underline this point. Analyses of value creation are fundamentally based on traditional spaces, consisting of firms operating in transactional markets (the transaction regime). But, since at least the mid-1980s, firms, especially larger ones, have been the subject of a deep transformation, and new modalities and value creation spaces have appeared. Outsourcing (since the 1989 Kodak contract), networking, and now open innovation have become hard facts within such a transformation. In parallel, and thanks to the digital revolution, new value production methods have appeared and, in many cases, the transaction is related to a multitude of links. Therefore, it could be argued that the new production system is fundamentally a production of links, as a complement to the production of transactions.

Digital transformation is deeply challenging how value is created. Close attention must be paid to value spaces, in particular, their organizational topography and dynamics. From this, emerges the need for a deep understanding of its singular nature. We need to examine its fundaments, especially its generative nature and the way it continuously explores and accelerates the links between existing and new value spaces. These observations led to the development of the concept of acceluction—the accelerated production of links. This notion was an outcome of the CIGREF Foundation’s long-term (1970–2020) Information Systems Dynamics (ISD) program and it aims to characterize the fundamental nature of new production systems digitality. As these links are the new drivers for value creation in digital spaces, we need to delineate their nature (transactional, organic, and semi-organic) (Bounfour, 2005). Such a deep change in the way of producing value has key implications for business models, job creation, and the global power of firms, nations, and organizations.

The empirical and analytical work carried out under the wide-ranging ISD program resulted in several publications.¹ The various projects that were supported by the program have revealed, directly or indirectly, that value production has been widely adopted by businesses. No longer limited to the traditional boundaries of the enterprise, it now encompasses many other domains: competitors, complementary resources (such as those of suppliers or relatively unconnected sectors), customers, mobility (as a new production space), data, social spaces and the private time of employees. This expansion suggests a new mode of production in which digitality is a key component, and where the boundaries and guiding principles are yet to be determined. The question of mobilizing intangibles under the accelucted regime is, first and foremost, a question of governing different and emerging value spaces. This leads me to the key research question of the chapter: What are the characteristics of the emerging regime of digitality and the role of intangibles in such a regime? By a regime, I understand the set of organizational disposals that a techno-system calls for firms and ecosystems to adopt. The acceluction regime, which will be characterized later, calls for firms and organizations to accelerate the production of links among numerous value spaces. Such an acceleration is the key organizational disposal that is needed to adopt in order to succeed and benefit from the potential of such a regime.

The Space-Time Dimension as a Starting Point

Let us consider the question of space-time as a starting point. As Krugman (1998) underlined, space is the final frontier of economic analysis, and digital has very firmly put it back in the limelight. More specifically, the articulation between space and time is becoming a core element in the emerging mode of production, mainly due to the digital revolution. The analysis of propositions that were put forward under the ISD program indicates that one of the underlying dimensions of the emerging enterprise is the acceleration of links between different spaces and, thus, a space-time contraction.

Acceleration was the subject of Hartmut Rosa’s post-doctoral thesis (Rosa, 2005/2010). I echo some of his arguments here, extending them to the digital domain. Rosa distinguishes between three periods of production: premodern (before the industrial revolution), modern (corresponding roughly to twentieth century industrialization), and postmodern (late twentieth, early twenty-first century). These three periods of human development (at least in the West) are characterized by rules that govern social relations, including the management of productive time. In this respect, the modern period is characterized by a clear differentiation between work time and free time, with particular attention paid to productive time. The postmodern period is characterized by the emergence of a fusion of times (productive and personal) and, in the process, the diminishing relevance of time controls. This is only made possible by digital acceleration: Its ubiquitous and instantaneous nature induce a considerable expansion of the production space, making attempts to control it, a very hard exercise.

Time and Space in Digital Worlds

Territoriality has been defined in terms of control (Sack, 1986). Digitality fundamentally challenges such a concept, or at least invites us to consider its main components, and the way they are articulated, jointly or sequentially. For organizations (firms), these issues have become part of daily life, but changes can also be observed at the more macroscopic level. Territoriality and space are a question of time, for example of relationships between spaces. The ubiquity of digitality has an important impact on the space–time relationship in the new production mode. As Le Goff (1977) demonstrated, in the medieval age, merchants organized time and space around clock time; productive space-time was aligned with their priorities, and not those of the church. In the context of value creation—and therefore capital circulation—time was organized by technological instruments, clocks (Harvey, 1989, pp. 170–171). In later work, Harvey (2005) builds on Lefebvre’s work on space (Lefebvre, 2000), distinguished between absolute space (walls, bridges, etc.), relative space (e.g., circulation, time-space compression), and relational space (vision, emotions). These three distinctions are being challenged by the emergence of digitality. In a similar vein, Hassan (2003) develops the concept of the chronoscopic society, which sees the conjunction of neoliberal globalization and information technology as a way to impact the way knowledge is disseminated in advanced societies. This nexus leads to an information ecology that affects individuals, culture, and society. Hassan goes on to argue that we are rapidly moving from a chronological temporality of clock time, to a digitality-compressed real time, which he, after Paul Virilio, names chronoscopic time (Hassan, 2003, p. 5).

Time is a central notion in our working and personal life. Clock time constitutes the central point of reference in daily life. Work time is the point of reference for individuals, organizations, and societies. Mumford (1934/1967, quoted in Hassan, 2003) argued that, in many respects, the clock was the central arm of the industrial revolution; but, more than the railway or the steam engine, the ICT revolution compresses both space and time. Taylor’s application of the principles of scientific management illustrates the importance of clock time in modern societies: Workers actions are controlled by clocks, and they may even need to beat the clock to survive. Most people suffer from a chronic lack of time. As Hassan (2003, p. 133) notes, “Being increasingly suspended in the real time of chronoscopic temporality means a lack of time to read, to study, to reflect, to consider, to concentrate, to debate and discuss, to care, to empathize, to analyze, to interpret, to scrutinize and to sympathize—and more”. In post-modern societies, time has become a scarce resource, a point that is underlined by Eriksen (2001), who refers to the “tyranny of the moment”. The acceleration of everything has led to a scarcity of resources, including the attention of others. This, naturally, has an impact on the status of knowledge.

The Acceleration of Everything

The notion of space is also altered by digital. Individual space is impacted by the ubiquity of digital artefacts. The contractual space is also challenged by digitality, since contracts are traditionally defined by reference to geographical space (Simone, 2012, p. 25). Following Rosa (2005/2010), among others, we can posit the hypothesis that the space-time of collective action is contracting, which poses a serious problem for organizations that, until now, have been governed by vertical hierarchies and control (bureaucratic organizations, or authoritarian governments). Adopting a broad-brush anthropological perspective, we may be witnessing the emergence of a new kind of behavior (and a new kind of human being), linked to the ubiquity of digital and the accompanying acceleration.

Digital objects and systems appear less like elements of infrastructure, and more like boundary objects in the transformation of business and society, and associated modes of innovation and control. Many studies highlight the experience dimension. Experience, the dictionary tells us, is all to do with perception and sensation, and is the etymological cousin of experiment. In the modern world, it is a very important dimension of the emerging production mode. Digital is a continuous space of experience both for individuals (or customers), and businesses and their strategies. The latter are conceived less and less in linear terms—to gain competitive advantage—and more and more in terms of engagement and experiment, this continuous process of trial and error ending with the implementation of ideas that work.² We can see similarities with the shrinkage of space-time: the ever shorter space-time of collective action, with unstable roles and blurred organizational boundaries. In this context, acceleration emerges as an essential transformational phenomenon, with impacts and implications that are not yet fully understood. The acceleration of spatiotemporal links, in particular, calls for a fundamental reflection on its nature, its future, and the associated risks.

The historian, Jacques Le Goff (1977) argues that as early as the Middle Ages in Europe, industrial mode of production isolated productive time. This had become controllable following the invention of ad hoc measurement instruments: clocks, timing machines, and the associated concept of hours worked. Modernity is, above all, about controlling predefined spaces (the enterprise). It is now clearly established that, in the current phase of late modernity, the boundaries between these spaces are being eroded; not only is this a source of tension, but it also represents a fundamental change in the way things are produced. This does not, of course, in any way herald the disappearance of factories, or the modes of production that are traditionally associated with them. But it does herald the ubiquity of productive time, correlated with the ubiquity of digital. This question and, in particular, the issue of the equivalence of norms, can also be considered in the long term, from a sociological angle.

The Postmodern Condition and Digitality

Lyotard (1979) provides an elegant analysis of the emergence of the postmodern condition and the role of knowledge. The postmodern condition is contrasted with the modern condition, for example the existence of a metadiscours: “I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative we decided to call modern ‘the science that refers to it to legitimize itself’” (Lyotard, 1979, p. 7). From this angle, digital technologies can be seen as a source of a grand narrative of societies. It could even be said that they are “the coup de grâce unless we interpret ‘digiworld’ itself as the latest great narrative?” (Malecki & Moriset, 2008, p. 222). Digitality can, then, be considered as both a source, and the matrix, for a hyper postmodern society.

The postmodern condition and digitality can also be related to the issue of learning modalities and, therefore, intelligence. What approaches do postmodern societies take to learning modalities? Simone (2012, pp. 32–37) argues that we are in the “third phase” of the history of knowledge, that is, how ideas and information are created. The first phase coincided with the invention of writing, which made it possible to present information on a stable support. The second began with the invention of printing, which allowed the large-scale production of knowledge via an ad hoc instrument: the book. These two phases are similar in the sense that they are both mental operations targeting texts. The third phase is mainly driven by videos and computers.

The invention of writing has had a huge impact on human beings, “it led to an immense increase in the importance of vision compared to hearing”, and the emergence of a specific mode of perception: alphabetic vision (Simone, 2012, p. 55). This has had an impact on the development of cognitive capabilities in modern humans. With the advent of digital technology, we are moving from alphabetic vision (based on sequences) to nonalphabetic nonvision (based on simultaneity). Hence simultaneous learning and, therefore, simultaneous intelligence has risen in importance (compared to sequential equivalents). This form of intelligence may be associated with a new type of human, the Homo Videns described by Sartori (1998, quoted in Simone, 2012), in his analysis of the transformation of societies through the media artifact of television. People (especially children) lose their ability for abstraction and, therefore, their ability to position themselves in space and time.

Digitality is, at a minimum, a factor that is accelerating the emergence of a postmodern mankind—and, therefore, a postmodern enterprise, in which space and time are greatly compressed. As a result, relationships between people, and aspects of organizations, are becoming more fluid. The questions that arise are: If we follow the norms argument, to what extent does this instability call for a new form of governance and institutions? And, what new equilibria are needed between different organizational design principles and frameworks?

Five Key Dimensions of Digitality

A thematic analysis of the propositions formulated by the ISD program points to five key dimensions in the digital transformation of the enterprise: (1) The expansion and plurality of spaces; (2) The articulation between transactional and organic links; (3) The spatiotemporal structure; (4) Organizational plasticity; and, finally, the central element of the analysis (5) The acceleration of links (see Fig. 8.1).

Fig. 8.1

The acceleration of links, at the core of digital transformation. Reprinted from Digital futures, digital transformation: From lean production to acceluction (p. 70), by A. Bounfour, 2016, Cham: Springer. Copyright 2016 by Springer. Reprinted with permission

The Expansion and Plurality of Value Creation Spaces and the Transformation of Modes of Value Production

Value creation spaces have mushroomed with the advent of digital. The borders of the enterprise have become fuzzy, and products and services are being developed in multiple spaces. Along with customers, suppliers, and internal resources—the traditional points of reference for business decisions—we must now consider complementors, mobility (customers and employees), the private time of company personnel, and the immense data space.

Meanwhile, value production modes are changing fundamentally. Traditionally, value is perceived (including in economic theory) as a process of consumption—and, therefore, literally the destruction—of an output (of tangible goods in particular). In the digital economy, as in the digital society, value is created and deployed by multiple channels, including experiential (notably that of the customer experience). Value is created by an individual and collective experience. This experiential process reinforces the indirectly transactional character of value creation modes. In digital spaces, the transaction is not directly linked to the underlying processes. The Google user, for example, is a resource rather than an object of the transaction, but this attention resource is mobilized for a transactional purpose, namely advertising. The Nike+ shoes that were analyzed by one of the ISD projects (El Sawy & Pereira, 2013) were designed as part of an experiential system, in which the end purpose is transactional. However, here the customer relationship is more complex. The product-service transaction takes place in the context of a global production system in which the experience of the information flow (behavior, benchmarking of individual users, belonging and contributing to a community of users) is a key part of the transaction. The plurality of spaces has been compounded by the complexity of production systems.

The Articulation of Transactional and Organic Links

From Ronald Coase onward, economists have theorized about the existence of the firm as a resource that is more-or-less organic, rather than by recourse to the market. Williamson developed the arguments that are essential to understanding the dynamics of resource organization, between the market and the hierarchy. The theory of organizations, which builds on the work of Chandler, justifies the singularity of the firm and develops a historical perspective for analyzing its modes of configuration over time. Digitality, associated with the long-term deployment of new managerial practices (outsourcing, networking of activities, etc.) leads us to revisit the question of the relation between transactionality and organicity.

Transactions, in other words, market relations are deployed on a massive scale within the enterprise, making it an organized market. However, this deployment is limited by cost and inefficiency, notably with respect to empowering innovation. Innovation requires a minimum level of organic relations between individuals in order to spread fully throughout the company’s internal space. Symmetrically, the market—and therefore the transaction process—once again becomes a key lever for organizing digital, including one of the most complex activities: innovation. Nowadays, people with varying degrees of expertise can collaborate on an innovation, without any prior contact. In other words, digital, and its associated platforms, enables innovation to be organized around purely transactional links. If we extend the spectrum to all forms of social interaction, we find that organicity does not necessarily predominate; there is often a degree of hybridization between the two modes or regimes. Generally, in the work sphere, interactions now combine transactional modes of governance with more-or-less organic modes (dominated by recognition-based relations).

The Management of Space–Time

Control over space-time is a vital dimension of business management. It is often seriously undermined by digital, which can clash with traditional mechanisms. Several ISD projects examined how companies have revisited their way of doing things, especially in areas that touch on product design, in geographically distributed contexts, with broad functional implications. The KBO 2020 project, for example, illustrates the need for R&D-intensive enterprises to develop instruments to control spatial and temporal alignment tensions when developing products with tight time constraints. The Desvaldo project showed how a global software development firm was obliged to invest heavily in developing the skills of its Chinese partner, drawing on agile methods, in order to cope with geographical constraints (one of the two sites was located in the United Kingdom, the other was in China).

Organizational Liquidity

Here, liquidity refers to the plastic (malleable) character of the enterprise, its boundaries, and its activities. Liquidity is greatly facilitated by virtuality: “the virtual is by no means the opposite of the real. On the contrary, it is a fecund and powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation, opens up the future, injects a core of meaning beneath the platitude of immediate physical presence” (Lévy, 1998, p. 16). Plasticity is significantly facilitated and amplified by digitality, not to mention the generative nature of digital technology. The development of cloud applications, crowdsourcing, and open innovation solutions are just a few illustrations of the huge move towards organizational liquidity, which will have a determining effect on the future enterprise.

The Acceleration of Links

The preceding elements prefigure an open production system that is dominated by accelerated links between a plethora of value creation spaces that are internal and external to the enterprise. Internally, this is illustrated by the wholesale deployment of mechanisms that shrink functional, disciplinary and geographical distances. Externally, the massive use of market mechanisms to develop ideas and innovation programs also attests to the importance of links between the different value creation spaces.

Acceluction: The Mode of Production of Emerging Digital Uses

Given the above considerations, is it time to recognize the emergence of a new, digitally-driven, mode of production and, thus, of business organization? If so, what are its key characteristics, and what are the implications for companies? The answer to the former question seems to be yes, for reasons that are developed below. The characterization of the emergent mode of production is a key step in the design of the 2020 enterprise. Drawing on work conducted by ISD partners and, more generally, the literature on the transformation of socioeconomic systems and their modes of governance, in the following we characterize—in both structural and conceptual terms—the emergent mode of production. First, however, we present a brief review of some of the concepts related to dominant modes of production, putting them in historical perspective. At the conceptual level, the dominant modes of production in the automotive industry were, until recently, dominant. Here, indeed, the concept of lean production has dominated over the past 30 years, along with its managerial variants (lean management, etc.).

The Lean Production as a Starting Point

Let us pause for a moment and look specifically at the space–time dimension of lean production. The concept grew out of a major MIT program in 1985 on the future of the automobile industry, and was mooted by John Krafcik (Krafcik, 1988). Lean refers to a system put in place by Toyota in the late 1950s, following organizational innovations introduced by Taiichi Ohno. In the early 1960s, a centralized system for the streamlined production of a material good (in this case, cars) was introduced by optimizing end-to-end flows: from supply chain, to production, to customer relations (Womack, Jones, & Ross, 1991). Lean focuses on controlling material flows between industrial operators (suppliers and large manufacturers). The production space is relatively circumscribed and is limited to enterprises in the sector (including the distribution network), although customer needs can also be integrated (lean being a substitute for mass production). Lean production followed observations of the dominant production system—the Toyota system. Worldwide, carmakers, especially American producers in the 1980s, sought to understand the system and replicate it. Lean is more advanced than mass production, in so far as it optimizes material and information flows, including those that relate to demand. It does so in a relatively confined and controlled system (see Fig. 8.2), consisting of suppliers, the enterprise itself, and its customers (distributors).

Fig. 8.2

The lean production space. Adapted from by A. Bounfour (2016, p. 76). Copyright 2016 by Springer. Adapted with permission

The flow space is pre-identified and, in some ways, relatively controlled. Even in a so-called “extended” enterprise, the core enterprise controls and manages the production system, albeit with an important adjustment relative to mass production: the need to integrate downstream information flows (from customers). Despite the extension of the productive space, the system remains relatively closed and, above all, stable. Toyota pioneered the introduction of standards in the 1950s and it was only much later, in the 1980s, that the practice spread to Europe, notably with the establishment of electronic data interchange and the emergence of standardization bodies (Galia in France, and its European counterpart Odette). As Table 8.1 shows, lean production is very much a production system governed by flow optimization.

Table 8.1 Lean production: Key characteristics

The concept of lean production is defined in Womack et al. (1991) (see Table 8.1). Their book contrasts the mass producer (e.g., the Western producer) with the lean producer (e.g., the Toyota producer). They say, “The mass-producer uses narrowly skilled professionals to design products made by unskilled or semiskilled workers tending expensive, single-purpose machines” (Womack et al., 1991, p. 13), whereas “the lean producer, by contrast, combines the advantages of craft and mass production, while avoiding the high cost of the former and the rigidity of the latter. Towards this end, lean producers employ teams of multiskilled workers at all levels of the organization and use highly flexible, increasingly automated machines to produce volumes of products in enormous variety” (Womack et al., 1991, p. 13).

So, lean production is distinguished from mass production not only by the skills’ profiles of workers and resource use, but also, and more importantly, by the continuous search for optimization. As the authors stress: “Perhaps the most striking difference between mass production and lean production lies in their ultimate objectives. Mass producers set a limited goal for themselves—‘good enough’. This translates into an acceptable number of defects, a maximum acceptable level of inventory, a narrow range of standardized products. To do better, they argue, would cost too much or exceed human capabilities” (Womack et al., 1991, p. 13); “Lean producers, on the other hand, set their sights explicitly on perfection: continually declining cost, zero defects, zero inventories, and endless product variety” (Womack et al., 1991, pp. 13–14). If we adopt the ISD program language, lean production is fundamentally a system of optimization of (mostly) physical flux within production spaces in the automotive industry (suppliers, original equipment manufacturers and, to a lesser extent, customers). Such a system naturally focuses on specific business functions: factories, design, suppliers, and dealerships.

However, digitality, bolstered by the internet, has radically transformed the economic, managerial, and social dimensions of the production space. As we noted earlier, it has become both broad and unstable. There is a degree of indeterminacy in its boundaries and in the identity of its participants. This phenomenon is amplified, at the sociological level, by the advent of postmodernity. One of the characteristics of the latter is a lesser willingness to heed rational, structured discourse and, consequently, a tendency to pay less attention to the forms of organizational order linked to mass production. Although there is no causality between postmodernity and digitality (the former preceded the latter chronologically), digitality has clearly amplified certain behavioral traits consistent with late modernity, such as individualism, volatility, and skepticism (notably about the existence of stable structures). At the symbolic level, value creation has moved toward immaterial objects and signifiers, of which, one digital variant relates to exposure in digital spaces.

The End of Materialism, the Beginning of Immateriality

Another way to conceive of the structure of the world, and of human existence, is to consider the question from the viewpoint of the transition of technological systems along two axes: a materials-energy axis, which dominated the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and a man-biosphere relationship-structure of time axis, dating from the beginning of the twenty-first century. The first axis is what Thierry Gaudin (Gaudin, 2013) has called the axis of materialism and the second, the axis of immaterialism. Following Simondon, among others, Gaudin points to the decline of materialistic values such as domination, conquest, and performance, and the emergence of immaterial values such as individuation, empathy, and resilience.

In this context, the questions—both theoretical and practical—that we must answer are twofold: (1) What are the arguments that justify the design of a new mode of production? And, subsequently, (2) What are its main constituents? These two points are addressed in the following, which is restricted, for the most part, to ISD’s field of expertise: socioeconomic aspects of the enterprise.

Acceluction: The Central Concept That Characterizes the New Mode of Production

Schematically, if we take a retrospective look at the question of modes of production, we can distinguish between three successive modes, each characterized by a struggle to take control of a particular resource:

• Agricultural: characterized by the importance of controlling the land;

• Industrial: one of the key resources is the workforce, which needs to be controlled;

• Acceluction: an emergent mode, founded on digital, in which the key resource is fundamentally immaterial. It consists of increasingly accelerating links, which economic operators seek to control, and is centered on the accelerated production of links. The concept signals the expansion of value creation spaces, and, more importantly, recognizes that value is being created by a rapid expansion of transactional or organic links (Bounfour, 2005, 2006), and their subsequent acceleration.

Adopting a sociological perspective, and following Touraine (1973), a production system is determined not only by technology, but also by various power relationships and, thus, by the behavior of potentially organized actors (see Fig. 8.3).

Fig. 8.3

Mass production, lean production and acceluction. Reprinted from A. Bounfour (2016, p. 80). Copyright 2016 by Springer. Reprinted with permission

Digital links may, or may not, be organic: A link established with others on a social network is, in principle, organic; a sale on eBay is not.

The Topography of Acceluction

If acceluction is the emergent guiding principle for (digital) enterprise governance, then we must establish its topography. Simply put, acceluction aims to characterize the importance of mobilizing digital resources. It articulates (transactional and organic) links with an extremely wide-ranging set of value production spaces, as it encompasses markets (not just customers), organic (and less organic) communities, hybrid organizational forms, and society at large.

Acceluction and Digital Generativity

Generativity refers to a technology’s capacity to produce sudden change, driven by a large number of diverse and uncoordinated participants (Zittrain, 2006, cited in Yoo, Kulathinal, & Wattal, 2014). It is contrasted with modularity, which tends to define problems in terms of predefined subsystems that can be controlled from a central point (such as a large company). The analysis of the spread of digital technology in recent work by Yoo et al. (2014), sponsored by the ISD program, points to the generative nature of digital technology, along with its transformational and, in some ways, unplannable character, observed in APIs and mash-ups on digital platforms. This demonstration dovetails, at another level, with the importance of links between actors and technological building blocks in specified digital spaces. The spatio-temporal analysis of generativity demonstrates the value of developing a dynamic, outward-looking vision of digital innovation: what Yoo et al. (2014) call “the generative digital platform”. This topography reflects the immense scope of action for the enterprise (and its chief information officer), in mobilizing its digital resources. Hence the importance of the equivalence of norms between the enterprise’s space of governance stricto sensu, and the spaces where links are generated.

Transactional Links

Transactional links refer to links that are established either in a market, or in the context of an enterprise, but governed by market logic. Examples of the former include bids for patents, open innovation (e.g., Innocentive in the United States, or Hypios in France), or the development of a market for exchanges within the company. Transactional links are not exclusive to collaborative forms of production.

Organic Links

Organic links refer to spaces (generally community, or Gemeinschaft in the sense of Tönnies, 1977), in which relations are governed, to varying degrees, by recognition (see Fig. 8.4). This principle often governs communities of researchers, communities of open-source developers, or natural communities such as regions, towns, or villages. Organicity has emerged from the crisis in implicit order, which is understood to mean the nature of the contract between individuals in large organizations.

Fig. 8.4

The topography of acceluction. Reprinted from A. Bounfour (2016, p. 81). Copyright 2016 by Springer. Reprinted with permission

Acceluction Regime, the New Competences and the Professions

The acceluction regime calls for the development of new competences and new professions. At the strategic level, continuous design of new business models is certainly a competence that will be needed to develop. Other competences, especially related to artificial intelligence are also to be considered (Bounfour, 2022), especially those related to the management of the platformization of ecosystems. At the operational level, the real-time management is a competence already in action (Rydén & El Sawy, 2022). At the individual level, cognitive, emotional and social competences are also to be considered for development, in this perspective. In relationship to the ethical dimension of the use of digital, citizenship—critical competences are also called for.

The Emerging Enterprise: Its Underlying Tensions

The future enterprise will be—and is already, to a great extent—an accelucted enterprise. Business models and overall governance will be centered on the management and accelerated production of multiple links that are constantly renewed. There can be no doubt that digital resources are already essential levers in this process (Bounfour, 2016). The acceluction regime is characterized by a tension between two conflicting dimensions of organizing: the solidity of organizations and their liquidity.

The solidity of organizations is the paradigm around which most managerial discourse—particularly with regard to large companies—has been constructed over the past century, especially since the emergence of the modern enterprise. It is characterized by: the organicity of interactions, the fixity of resources (including personnel), the community regime, long timespans/(vertical) spaces to build, and the specialization of resources. But, as we have seen in several contexts (and this is not the least of digital’s impacts), the solidity as a discourse—and, with it, the solid enterprise—is fundamentally subverted by the liquidity as a practice.

The liquidity of organizations—and, consequently, the liquid enterprise—is characterized a contrario by another set of rules: transactional principles, mobile resources (including personnel) and unstable roles, short timespans and finite space, and market or platform resources. The acceluction regime reflects the tension between these two (sub-)regimes.

Experiments conducted under the ISD program clearly illustrate this tension: Solutions that have been trialed or rolled out by companies are sometimes liquid in character, sometimes noted, however, that the emergent mode of production, acceluction, does not indicate that digital enterprises will necessarily be liquid enterprises; what it does indicate is the importance of this liquidity. The above observations make it clear that the management of the future enterprise will be based on permanent trade-offs between contradictory options. The ubiquity of digital makes the behavior of actors and, therefore, that of enterprises, highly unstable and very open. Several of the ISD projects provide concrete examples of enterprises that are governed by a regime of tension (between partnerships, functions, geographies, timescales, etc.). With the multiplication of value creation spaces and potential positions, there is no longer any one best way that all enterprises should aim for. There are only separate, unique paths. This evaluation criterion puts decision-makers in a far more uncomfortable position than before, due to the open nature of the game, the uncertainty, and the risk attendant on any position they choose.

The Liquid Enterprise: Its Key Characteristics

Bauman (2007) proposed the concept of liquid modernity/the liquid society to characterize current societies. Liquidity can also be a source of a strong surveillance (Bauman & Lyon, 2013). Similarly, enterprises, supported by digital resources, are developing various degrees and forms of liquidity. Here, we investigate the concept of the liquid enterprise through an examination of its different dimensions—time, space, coordination, resource planning, contracts, and so forth, and how this concept is consistent with that of the liquid society. The focus is on the importance of the consonance of norms and behaviors. As most of the digital transformation is beyond the control of firms, it is important for them, and their managers, to build their approaches and tools upon societal rules and norms.

According to the principle of the equivalence of norms, liquidity in social interactions is also observed at the firm level, although it is difficult to identify its origins. At the societal level, postmodern behaviors are often dated to the mid-1970s. At the firm level, restructuring, especially in the West, became widespread in the 1980s. The extensive restructuring that has taken place over the past three decades, and the associated impacts on employees’ “mental space” has contributed to increasing the distance between workers and the strategic and organizational discourse of management. The emergence of outsourcing, together with the networked enterprise (where Cisco is the emblematic example) are other sources of the liquefaction of enterprises. Liquidity in this case, is not only—or even primarily—linked to digitality; instead, it is closely related to managerial practices, which have progressively increased the liquidity of firms and, therefore, the liquidity of social contracts.

Generation Y as an Illustration

Liquidity is illustrated by the results of a series of workshops that were organized during preparations for the ISD program, with the so-called Generation Y. Twenty participants were asked about various topics: their fundamental personal values, their relationship to their employer’s strategy, working relationships, how they saw their career developing, their views on digital objects, how they spent their time (both at work and elsewhere) and, finally, how they saw the future of their employer. These discussions revealed that their relationship to their employer appeared to be almost transactional, that is, governed by purely rational calculations. In most cases, these young people behave according to a win-win principle, illustrated by the way they spend their time. If responding to an email sent by their boss in the evening takes three minutes, they will spend the same three minutes on social media during working hours.

This illustration of liquidity is consistent with the general principles defined by Bauman for society. Furthermore, when it comes to career development, Generation Y applies the principle of the impairment test, similar to International Financial Reporting Standards for specific intangibles. They continuously test the value of their skills in the job market, even if they are not looking for a job. Naturally, digital artifacts facilitate this behavior. The results of our workshops suggest that while such behavior is indeed facilitated by digital artifacts and systems, it also finds its origin (at least for some participants) in the waves of restructuring that their parents had to face. These events established the roots for liquidity that are now being translated into specific interaction behaviors within and around firms.

The Liquid Enterprise and Digitality

In their book on the economic history of industrial revolutions, Freeman and Louçã (2001) describe the components of the most recent Kondratiev wave: the ICT revolution. Its main ingredients are computers, telecommunications, institutional (regulatory) settings, and a new organizational design based on the networked enterprise. If we consider these ingredients to be the major components of the new production system, liquidity and digitality are key aspects, and are closely related to the ongoing transformation of our economies and societies. We can then state that the liquid enterprise and digitality are closely-related phenomenon, without necessarily establishing a causal relationship between them. Here, the liquid enterprise refers to plasticity in both its modes of governance, and its boundaries and resources. Digitality is a great enabler of such plasticity: It contracts the time–space of the firm, and facilitates the accumulation of resources without boundaries, or even significant investment. Consequently, it is a serious challenge to the social contract found in modern organizations, particularly the so-called “salarial” (traditional) contract.

The Liquid Enterprise and Liquid Management

The liquid enterprise calls for liquid management. This raises the issue of aligning managerial practices with liquidity requirements. From this perspective, business strategy should be thought of as a succession of decisions that are adjusted to market and local conditions. As for investment, decision-making is a continuous trade-off between external and internal resources that are permanently under pressure. With respect to collaboration and coordination, incentive systems must take greater account of the intrinsic nature and behavior of people, especially the fundamental nature of the social contracting process, which is increasingly governed by liquid relationships.

The Liquid Enterprise and Organizational Design

The liquid enterprise, and liquidity in general, are interesting concepts related to the future design of enterprises and societies. However, it can be argued that, theoretically, as far as the design of organizations is concerned, there are limits to liquidity and a form of solidity is needed for collective action. Exchanged artifacts may lead to specific behaviors where speed and acceleration are the major drivers for performance. In this case, especially in organizational contexts that are dominated by intangibility, liquidity may represent an advantage for organizing.

Intangibles Under the Acceluction Regime

The foregoing arguments suggest that mobilizing intangibles under the acceluction regime raises various analytical, policy, and societal issues.

At the analytical level, several issues are relevant. They include:

• The unit of analysis. This is not a new issue, since the literature on networks, ecosystems and company boundaries has already revealed the need to go beyond the traditional firm as the unit of analysis. Taking a geographical perspective should help to address this issue, as we need to delineate the value space and the way boundaries are articulated.

• The type of intangibles. If we take this starting point, there is a need to align intangible taxonomies with those of the identified value spaces. At this point in time, taxonomies are either microeconomic (e.g., firm) oriented, or macroeconomic (e.g., national account) oriented. If we consider that value is now created within, in between and around a variety of value spaces, then we need to align these taxonomies and, going further, harmonize accounting instruments and measurements of the type of activities and transactions that are linked to these assets.

Liquidity is an illustrative example in this respect. Here, the issue is: Does the liquid enterprise necessarily lead to liquid intangible assets? Which, in practice, means fundamentally individual assets. The issue of building and leveraging individual assets is also relevant in a context where individual-centric firms and freelancization are emerging as significant forms of organizing activities.

Another major issue relates to data as a digital asset. In a context where platformization is becoming a dominant way to organize activities, there is a need to better-document the functioning of data as digital spaces, and the way value is created, organized and controlled, especially by major platforms. In this regard, the hybridization of intangibles (IPRs, data, advertising) by major platforms is an important issue that needs to be better understood.

Finally, there is the issue of the territorialization of intangibles. Territories, in a geographical sense, are governed by digitality, knowledge flow and hybridization, together with trust and social capital building.

• The question of time/space Time and space are two facets of the same problem: the organization of activities. To a certain extent, time is just a succession of spaces. The acceluction paradigm brings to the fore—more than ever—the question of the close links between these two fundamental dimensions of human action.

• Transactions/organic links—along with the issues of value measurement and wealth. Economists measure wealth in terms of monetary transactions. But we know that societal relationships are governed by many other factors, notably, what Marcel Hénaff called the “non-price” (hors-prix) space. Hénaff drew upon the debate between Socrates and the Sophists to address the issue of the impossibility of valuing knowledge (Hénaff, 2002). In other words, monetization is only one dimension of social interaction and value creation. At the same time, the multiplicity of value spaces de-multiplies the variety of exchange channels, both transactional (in most cases, monetary) and non-transactional (especially organic).

At the policy level, the main issues relate to the instruments that are in place. To what extent does the acceluction regime need to be considered in more detail? At least three types of instruments are relevant: those related to innovation and sustainability; those related to competition policy; and, finally, those that target societal cohesion.

• Supporting innovation and sustainability in the context of the accelucted regime. Here, two issues should be considered: To what extent are existing policy instruments aligned with emerging taxonomies of intangibles and their leveraging under the accelucted regime? And, to what extent is acceluction itself, as a systemic phenomenon, taken into account? These questions underline the need for policy instruments to integrate the full range of value spaces (beyond firms and nations). They also highlight the issue of generativity as a key characteristic of digital transformation, and the dynamics of the new formative power in digital spaces (e.g., major platforms).

• Revisiting competition policy. Here, the main issue concerns the way major platforms shape economic systems, and build real, formative power. The question is of particular relevance in the European context. Major platforms deeply leverage acceluction by taking advantage of the multiplicity of value spaces. In doing so, they control critical resources that drive economic performance. If we refer to the two-sided market approach, it is clear that these organizations control two, critical resources: consumer attention and related data, on the one hand, and advertising, on the other. These are, of course, very critical intangible resources. But there is another—the control of IPRs, especially for emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. In this context, competition policy should be urgently adapted to take into account these three layers: data and attention, advertising, and IPRs.

At the societal level, the main challenge relates to the implications of the generalization of homo videns behavior and, therefore, the amplification of liquidity due to the acceluction regime. The COVID-19 crisis, however, tends to suggest that such an amplification is not inevitable since, in exceptional circumstances, the Hobbesian sphere (e.g., state power) once again gains legitimacy with respect to collective action. But, more generally, since acceluction is fundamentally a regime of uncertainty, it becomes very relevant to define, experiment with, and implement new approaches to the design of the future. In one sense, we could say that the issue concerns the future as an (intangible) asset. By adopting this approach, policymakers, and society in general, can revisit and regenerate collective action. This will clearly necessitate revisiting recognition mechanisms in societies, as discussed by Ricœur (2004) and Honneth (2000), and how collective action might lead to the generation of new intangibles.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I tried to characterize the foundation of what I call the accelucted regime as the dominant mode of value creation in digital spaces. Taking this as a starting point, it is clear that intangibles—as the main source of value creation—will also be affected by such a regime. In other terms, the way socio-economic systems will be organized will naturally impact the types of intangibles to be mobilized (individual assets, community assets, platform assets). At the end, the control of such assets, will certainly impact the distribution of power in the near future.