Quantum Economics, Potential, And The 4V’s Business Model.

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To get your head around quantum mechanics, it’s necessary to be able to think about a space that’s between reality (called spacetime in the language of the science) and imagination, something that doesn’t exist. This half-way house, this in-between, is not unreal. But it can’t be observed or verified. Some of its inhabitants will become real and verifiable and some won’t, never to be observed at all. A way to think about this in-between is as potential. Potential is sometimes realized, and sometimes it isn’t.

In her book Understanding Our Unseen Reality, Ruth E. Kastner explains how potential can be realized in quantumland. It takes the form of a transactional process, in which a quantum object that she calls an emitter sends out an offer wave. Under certain conditions, another quantum object, which she calls an absorber, can receive the offer wave and send a confirmation wave in return. If the confirmation is a mirror image of the offer, the two objects have formed an incipient transaction. If there is only one offer and only one matching confirmation that is an exact mirror image, the incipient transaction becomes actualized and real. It becomes, in Kastner’s words, “A brick’, an observable, verifiable event in spacetime. (pp 48-53)

I am quite sure I have oversimplified quantum theory. However, it’s in the good cause of making an analogy that is useful for real-world practicing entrepreneurs and businesses.

Austrian economics is quantum economics. Quantum mechanics is the study of behavior and properties and interactions of the smallest units of energy in the universe.  One of its revelations is that “the rules are different” at this scale. The rules of classical physics do not apply. Austrian economics is the study of the smallest unit of energy in the economic system, the individual. The term that is used in economic science is methodological individualism: the study of the behaviors and properties and interactions of individual people and how they propagate into processes like value creation, and economic growth, and into structures like firms. (Here’s a white paper that explains in detail.)

An example of an emergent process is the Austrian Business Model, a framework for profit-making operations for businesses. The essence of the Austrian Business Model, the engine if you will, is the core value generation process we call 4V’s. The 4V’s represent a rolling, recursive, repeating value process for firms to successfully bring new innovation to the market. The 4V’s are Value Potential, Value Facilitation, Value Capture, and Value Agility.

In quadrant V1, Value Potential, is in quantumland. It’s not yet real, but it can be. Think of it as the space where the consumer is sending out offer waves, just like a quantum object. These offer waves are a little hard to process. The consumer expresses dissatisfaction, or unease with the current state of their consumption experience. Things could be better. The wine could be more to their taste, or it could be less expensive. They like the room afforded by their SUV but they’re a bit unsure whether they can put up with the mpg levels. They like going to restaurants but it might be nicer if the restaurant came to them. Maybe they feel they’re not getting all the possible benefits that they could from the internet. Or Netflix. Why is zoom so hard to use? Why does my bank treat me with such disdain? Why can’t I eat as much chocolate as I would like? Why is healthcare so expensive? I’d like to earn a degree, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the 4-year commitment or the money. Why is the CFA exam so hard? Why is dentistry so painful? Is my dog enjoying its food? I hate having acne. I have a headache. Sometimes, I feel a bit lonely.

Consumer sentiments such as these are offer waves. They’re the signal that precedes an incipient transaction. If they are important enough to the individual, and if they’re important to enough individuals, they represent value potential. For example, unease about the time commitment and cost of acquiring a traditional 4 year degree could be an offer wave that, when absorbed and confirmed, becomes educational innovation, the formation of online for-profit degree courses, and ultimately Coursera and Masterclass. Concern about the palatability of dogfood could become The Farmer’s Dog, or A Pup Above or one of many more entrepreneurial initiatives. Feeling lonely sparks the $3 billion online dating industry, or Meetup.

None of these businesses are real in their pre-existence as consumer unease. They are potential. Every firm, every business unit, every industry, every innovation begins as a quantum object we call consumer dissatisfaction. Every firm needs to begin with a stash of value potential. Every firm needs to be able to exercise empathy to detect the signals, understand the feelings of the emitters, the dissatisfied consumers, and translate them into commercial possibilities. These firms need the creative imagination and the resourcefulness to devise and run multiple probes into these possibilities, a portfolio of experiments in activating potential. Some will work in generating a confirmation signal that the consumer determines is the mirror image to their unease. Many experiments won’t work. The process is probabilistic. It might be possible to improve the probabilities in your firm’s favor by running more experiments or becoming better at absorbing offer waves. Or it might not.

Whatever the case, identifying and accumulating value potential is a necessary capability of every successful firm. Without it, there is no success. It requires deep, intimate understanding of the consumers, and a commitment to interpreting their offer waves. It requires the humility to know that it’s hard to perfect the process, and that there will be a lot of misinterpretations and errors.

 

 

Value Is A Process – the Essence Of Entrepreneurship.

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This article is a summation of arguments made in a recent academic publication in Small Business Economics Journal, entitled “Subjective Value and Entrepreneurship” by Drs. Per L. Bylund and Mark D. Packard.

 

What is the value of a pizza?

If you asked a standard economist, they might—thinking themself quite clever—ask in return, “well, what would you pay for one?” Now, that’s a fine response as far as it goes. But in neoclassical economic theory, that’s not as far as they seem to think.

Standard economists will readily admit that value is subjective, but what they mean by that is not what subjectivists mean by it. See, in philosophy of science, social science divides down strict lines of ‘objectivism’ and ‘subjectivism.’ The objectivist—also realist or positivist (these are distinct terms, but align in the objectivist paradigm)—sees the social world as comprising real things, objective phenomena that are more-or-less stable and causally deterministic and, thus able to be studied as such. In other words, social reality is in principle no different from physical reality, and we can study it the same way. Yes, it’s true that there’s tons of noise and randomness when studying social phenomena, which require statistical methods to find causal relationships, but the same is true of certain natural sciences too, such as climate science (not exactly a ringing endorsement in many libertarian circles).

Applying objectivist philosophy to the value concept, the assumption is that value is real and objective. A pizza has value—it’s there in the pizza. But what’s interesting about this value—which has been defined as ‘marginal utility’ since 1871—is that it’s different for everyone. Utility, of course, is usefulness—how much benefit I would get from the pizza. But utility is different for everyone—we have different tastes, dietary needs, and so forth. What this means is the objectivist economist—which is most of them—understands value as objective but idiosyncratic. ‘Idiosyncratic’ is synonymous with ‘subjective’ if you’re an objectivist.

But philosophical subjectivism, as the Austrian School espouses, sees the social realm very differently. There is no “social reality,” strictly speaking. A job, a marriage, a personality, a reputation—these don’t really exist. ‘Reality’ references the physical realm—what the natural sciences study. The company Google is just a concept—a figment of our imagination. There are real people that ‘belong’ to the Google organization; there are physical structures that comprise Google’s offices (the Googleplex); Google even creates some physical products. But the organization ‘Google’ is just a concept that Sergey Brin and Larry Page conjured and was granted ‘legal status’ (which is just getting another imaginary organization’s imaginary stamp of approval), which solidified the concept ‘Google’ as a ‘legal entity’ into the minds of people that is—for most intents and purposes—for us as if Google were a real ‘thing’. Lots of social constructions are like that: marriages, job titles, fictional characters like Harry Potter, etc. Many more are flimsier: relationships, reputations, scientific knowledge, etc. These have little or no institutional status, and so evolve with the whims of society. Studying social phenomena from this subjectivist perspective, then entails understanding what people think about those phenomena, how they understand them and why.

Value, from a philosophically subjectivist viewpoint, is very different from the objectivist concept of value as objective, idiosyncratic usefulness. Instead, subjective value occurs in the mind.

There are two key aspects of a subjective value concept, which we can distinguish by the form of word (i.e. part of speech) that it takes. As a verb, value (i.e. to value) is a prediction of or reflection on a benefit (depending on the context of the valuing). To say “I value the pizza” means either ‘I expect to benefit from the pizza’ or ‘after eating the pizza, I recognize benefit gained from it.’ As a noun, value is a conscious experience of benefit. This means that there is no value until it’s been experienced. When you understand the experiential nature of value, then we can’t equate predictions of value (value as a verb) with real value (value as a noun).

So when we ask, again, what is the value of a pizza, the right retort, from a subjectivist perspective is not “what would you pay for one,” but “how much benefit did you experience from it?”

To show how and why this matters, consider an example. Let’s say you’re hungry and are in the mood for pizza, enough so that you’re willing to pay up to $20 for one. So you ordered a pizza from Bylund Pizzeria around the corner for $10, who makes the pizza at a cost of $5. You have it delivered and leave $2 for tip, bringing your total outlay to $12.

In the traditional economic analysis, the example stops here. You have all the information that you need to calculate total economic value created. Economists estimate value as willingness-to-pay or WTP—how much you were willing to spend to satisfy your want, $20 in this case. The price P ($10+2) and cost C ($5) are the other two relevant factors. Total economic value creation is calculated as WTP-C, the total new consumer value minus the cost in resources and labor to produce it: $20 – $5 = $15.

But the subjectivist framework doesn’t stop here. Again, value hasn’t emerged yet, since it hasn’t yet been experienced. So let’s keep going. You sit down to the table, open up the pizza box and find a beautiful pizza with a fat cockroach crawling on top of it. You slam the box shut and run it outside to the nearest dumpster.

So let’s redo our economic value analysis now. Value isn’t WTP, it’s the benefit experienced. What was the total value achieved from the pizza? Zero. Probably even negative—you could say that you experienced harm rather than benefit, both in the trauma of the fright and in the fact that now dinner is going to be late. Let’s plug in zero: $0 – $5 = -$5. In other words, economic value was destroyed in the transaction—$5 of resource were expended for absolutely no benefit.

Life is an endless value journey—action and experience are continuous from birth to death. This journey is a learning process. What valuation should we assign goods, services, and activities? How should we prioritize our activities and expenditures to maximize our value experiences and well-being?

The principle of diminishing marginal utility—that consumption of a second unit of a good is not as valuable as the first—is widely known and accepted. But what’s not widely admitted, although we know it intuitively, is that the needs that we must satisfy to maximize well-being are dynamic. We keep getting hungry over and over again. One might break an arm, birth a child, pick up a new hobby, or start a new diet—changes that alter the things we value most. Similarly, changes are going on around us that have similar effects—changes in the weather, new innovations, pandemics, and politics.

Value is a process—one that we’re not just constantly engaged in but also constantly monitoring and learning from. It is in this process—in advancing it forward—that we find the essence of entrepreneurship.

How To Think Like A Successful Entrepreneur.

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Successful entrepreneurs think about their business in value terms, and they recognize that they do not themselves determine the value of their offering — the consumer of the final good does.

Entrepreneurship is about treading new ground. It is about taking a step no one has taken before, at least not in that same way or in the same place. So it should not be surprising that much of the scholarly literature on entrepreneurship, since Richard Cantillon in the early 1700s, has focused on entrepreneurship as uncertainty-bearing.

Although “bearing uncertainty” might be what entrepreneurs do in the economy from a theorist’s point of view, it is not — and should not be — the rationale for starting a business. After all, uncertainty means the outcome is unknown, which in turn means it could end up ugly. In other words, uncertainty is a cost — it is a burden on the entrepreneur’s shoulders. Entrepreneurs are right to attempt to avoid the uncertainty.

The fact is that theorists have it both right and wrong. Yes, entrepreneurs bear uncertainty because they are the ones getting the reward as profit and also the ones suffering the loss if things do not work out. But that uncertainty-bearing characterizes entrepreneurship does not make it the point of being an entrepreneur. Rather, it is a “necessary evil.”

What Successful Entrepreneurs Understand

Successful entrepreneurs, both in the past and present, understand the actual meaning of uncertainty. Those who already experienced success have often learned it the hard way, through experience. Those who are more likely than others to become successful have understood it in the abstract or have the right gut feeling. Regardless of which it is, past or present, they understand that uncertainty is “worth it.”

What this means is that they don’t focus on uncertainty, but accept it. Entrepreneurs choose to bear uncertainty much like someone putting in the hard work — perhaps 10,000 hours’ worth — knows that hard practice is the means to achieve success. How to endure those endless hours of seemingly never-ending tedious work? Eyes on the prize.

Successful entrepreneurs recognize the prize and what it takes to get there. They realize that the only way their business can convince customers to buy from them and to beat the competition is to provide value. To the extent they are not simply lucky, successful entrepreneurs rely on a value-dominant logic: they place the end value of their efforts first, and direct their efforts to maximize value.

There are three key components to the value-dominant logic that help you apply it in your business:

  1. Value is the entrepreneur’s super power.

Entrepreneurs bear uncertainty because it is the only way of doing something different, something new, and to bring about value greater than everybody else has. After all, doing what someone else is already doing is not a way to set yourself apart. It is also not a way of being truly successful. To be successful, you need to develop your super power: to figure out, focus on and deliver real value.

  1. Value is subjective.

It sounds strange, but it is true: Value is subjective. This does not mean value can be anything or that it is relative or that there is no such thing as real value. It just means value is in the eyes of the beholder. The important lesson here is that you, the entrepreneur, do not determine what value is. Your job is to figure out how what you offer can be of value to others. That is what you should be focusing on, not on what you think would make your offering “better.”

  1. The consumer is the ultimate valuer.

Any entrepreneur, whether in B2C or B2B, should recognize that, ultimately, the consumer is king. Or, as scholars put it, the consumer is sovereign. If you are selling directly to consumers, it is obvious enough. You cannot place a sale unless consumers value your offering. But even in B2B you cannot stay in business long unless what you contribute to the economy is of value to the final consumer. Even if your customers like what you are doing, unless the consumer of the final good likes it you’re not going to sustain profitability.

Another way of adopting the value-dominant logic is to adopt the “4 Vs” model developed by Hunter Hastings of the Economics 4 Business podcast. He summarizes these points for thinking like a successful entrepreneur using four value statements: Value potential, understanding and assessing potential consumer subjective value; Value facilitation, making it possible for them to consume; Value capture, how much the firm realizes of the value facilitated by a value ecosystem that the customer orchestrates; and Value agility, how well does the firm respond to changing consumer-preferences and competitive propositions and how well does the firm sustain a continuous delivery of innovation to the consumer.

The point is not the terminology or model, but the lesson: that value should come first. And when you place value first, and recognize that it is subjective and for the consumer, the burden of uncertainty becomes bearable. It is but a means for attaining the end. It is costly for sure, but it is a necessary cost in order to pioneer production and break new ground.

Importantly, the burden of uncertainty is justifiable because it makes it possible for you to bring about value. This point is key to being successful.

108. Per Bylund and Mark Packard: Radically Reshaping Business Thinking via Subjective Value

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In a recently published paper titled “Subjective Value In Entrepreneurship,” Professors Bylund and Packard apply the principle of subjective value to generate significant new avenues of thinking for entrepreneurial businesses to pursue.

Download The Episode Resource10 Radical Shifts in Business Thinking – Download

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Re-think value.

Business schools teach value creation. But their definition of value is faulty, based on a profound misunderstanding. Value is not objective and measurable, as in the business school paradigm of generating more of it. Value is subjectively understood and experienced. It’s a motivation for action (people have a desire to achieve experiences that they value) but it’s immeasurable. It is emergent from complex social systems and patterns of interaction between individuals, not something “created” by businesses.

Re-think the economics of value and value creation.

Value is created by consumers via their experiences. Producers are servants to consumers and their preferences; producers seek to convince consumers to allow them to provide for their wants. Since consumers have alternative courses of action, producers must scrutinize and revise their plans continuously to conform with consumers’ changing choices. This is consumer sovereignty, an essential element of a value-centric business model.

Re-think the role of the consumer in the economic system.

Consumers facilitate their own consumption. They pursue their own individual well-being, including by expressing their wants and needs to producers. The demanding of solutions is the task of the consumer, as is the choosing between available and expected alternatives. They experience value uncertainty (their preferences may end up dissatisfied) and they actively assess and learn about entrepreneurially produced alternatives that are available. They learn cumulatively as they amass consumer experience. Thus the role of value innovation and solution discovery is, actually, the consumer’s and not the producer’s. Innovations are generated by consumers in their never-ending pursuit of higher-valued satisfactions. Consumers’ own imagination and understanding shape their subjective experience.

Re-think the role of the firm.

The producer’s role can be divided into value proposition creation, value facilitation and value capture. Producers respond to consumers’ dissatisfactions with the status quo by devising and assembling new value propositions – features and benefits responsive to consumer wants, aiming to generate feelings of well-being and satisfaction. Producers become partners in the consumer’s value learning process, providing a comparatively better offering than others, so that the consumer prefers it.

The consumer generates a willingness-to-pay, when they feel that the use value of an entrepreneurial offering exceeds the price they are asked to pay. The offering now has exchange value to the consumer. This money magnitude does not indicate the actual subjective value to the parties, but it does generate profit (if it covers production costs) that can be used in the market.

Re-think business models.

A business model captures the fundamental idea of consumers and innovative businesses jointly navigating a shared experience of value uncertainty, in a never-ending quest for higher value states from which they can both profit. This co-navigation process must be built in to business model design, and business model innovation consists of new co-navigation pathways and new ways of sharing. For example, the concept of generative business models we explored in E4B episode #104 gives a greater role in co-navigation to consumers as a way of generating new value.

Management without measurement.

Subjective value represents a challenge to theories of business that adopt a “make the numbers” approach to performance. When value is immeasurable, business processes must be assessed via variables such as the quality of understanding of the consumer and their preferences, the quality and accuracy of empathic diagnosis, and the trust generated with consumers to adopt the business as a co-navigator of value uncertainty. It is possible that survey data can be helpful. More fundamentally, Austrian economics can provide a set of principles for management without measurement.

One approach is qualitative models, which can be designed and subsequently calibrated with marketplace activity. One form of such models is simulation, using agents that represent the emotions and uncertainty felt by consumers in markets. This is a direction that technologically-augmented entrepreneurship may take.

Re-think output metrics.

Similarly, in a world of subjective value and qualitative assessment, concepts such as KPI’s (key performance indicators) can’t realistically be applied. Concepts such as profit and free cash flow continue to apply, given full recognition that they are reflections of accounting conventions, because they indicate the sustainability of the firm and its business model. But new output metrics for subjectively-experienced consumer value and for satisfaction and well-being remain to be invented.

Re-think organizational design.

Subjective value applies not only to consumer activities but equally to entrepreneurial activities. Professors Bylund and Packard present entrepreneurship as an individual journey, one that is primarily mental. The journey is a series of imaginations, judgments and learning over time regarding what problems to solve, what resources are available, what those resources can do, what can and should be done with them (in combination), how to do it and why (i.e. what are the goals and ends the prospective entrepreneur aims for).

Entrepreneurship is chosen. In an entrepreneurial business, many individuals are engaged in — choose — entrepreneurship. Much of their motivation lies in unleashing their imagination, processing their own learning, and finding purpose and meaning. Organizational design becomes the search for the best structures to free the individual to make entrepreneurial choices, to apply their individual imagination and explore the co-navigation of uncertainty with consumers. The firms that do this best will be the ones that succeed in value facilitation and value capture.

Re-think motivation and incentives.

Why do individuals choose entrepreneurship? As Professors Bylund and Packard point out, money magnitudes do not express much of entrepreneurial motivation. Subjective values of purpose, meaning, achievement, personal fulfillment and others are primary. These can not be captured in salaries, bonuses, awards, promotions and titles. The firms that master subjectivist motivations will be able to attract the best talent.

Re-think the social contribution of business.

Entrepreneurial capitalism is under fire in America today. Profit is seen as exploitative, and employment is often viewed as restrictive and oppressive. The ends of business are sometimes portrayed as conflicting with those of society.

An understanding of subjective value would generate a perspective of business as the facilitator of satisfaction and well-being in society. Business creates jobs and incomes for consumers, enabling them to facilitate their own value both in the form of psychic reward in their work and user satisfaction in their consumption value experiences. Individuals, families and communities are all beneficiaries of this value generation.

Businesses provide consumers with continuously improved goods and services at ever-lower costs, providing the means for consumers to achieve their desired experiences and satisfactions. This provision of means is generated entirely in response to consumers’ expressed wants and preferences.

Contribution to societal well-being is therefore the sole end of entrepreneurial business.

Additional Resources

10 Radical Shifts in Business Thinking (PDF): Download Here

“Subjective Value In Entrepreneurship” by Mark Packard and Per Bylund (PDF): Download Here

“The Value Generation Business Model” (video): Watch Here

Corresponding PowerPoint (Download Here) and Keynote Slides (Download Here)

The Austrian Business Model (video): https://e4epod.com/model

Start Your Own Entrepreneurial Journey

Ready to put Austrian Economics knowledge from the podcast to work for your business? Start your own entrepreneurial journey.

Enjoying The Podcast? Review, Subscribe & Listen On Your Favorite Platform:

Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify

“Subjective Value In Entrepreneurship” by Mark Packard and Per Bylund (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_108_Article

“The Value Generation Business Model” (video): Mises.org/E4B_108_Video

Corresponding PowerPoint (Mises.org/E4B_108_PPT) and Keynote Slides (Mises.org/E4B_108_Key)

“The Austrian Business Model” (video): Mises.org/E4B_108_ABM

107. Ivan Jankovic: The Special Understanding of Entrepreneurship by Americans of the Austrian School

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Austrian economics has always been on the leading edge of innovative thinking applicable to business. Back in the last century, there was a group of American economists of the Austrian school who greatly advanced theories related to subjectivism; that is, the role of human beliefs and preferences, and of the market as a process. Here are some of the insights they gave us about entrepreneurial business.

Download The Episode ResourceEntrepreneurship Drives Markets, Innovation, and Value Generation – Download

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

The function of entrepreneurship is the generation of new subjectively perceived value.

These economists got the name The Psychological School, because they understood that value is a function of human feelings, preferences and beliefs. The secrets to the successful pursuit of new value are not found in data and mathematics, but in human motivation.

The activity of entrepreneurs is the development and implementation of value-generation business models.

The twentieth-century economists we talk about on the podcast this week would probably never use the term business model. But their concept of the market as a process governed by subjectivism would embrace this modern term. A business model is a recipe for identifying value potential — an analytical outcome of understanding customer preferences — assembling a value proposition — a creative act of the entrepreneur — and enabling the customer to experience value, some of which can be captured by the entrepreneur via exchange if the business model is well-constructed.

Who are entrepreneurs?

Historically, some economists have debated whether entrepreneurs play the role of managers of the assets and activities of firms, or the role of owners establishing the asset base and purpose of the firm, or the role of capitalists providing the enabling financial capital. From the subjectivist point of view, it’s not a difficult question. Entrepreneurs are those engaged in the business of pursuing and generating new value. They might play one or more roles (manager, owner, capitalist) at different times in the pursuit.

Those in business firms who do not have an entrepreneurial role are the bureaucrats engaged in governance actions with no customer value, imposed by external influencers, usually government.

How do entrepreneurs generate value?

These economists understood the market as a process of individuals interacting to exchange. Therefore, they were able to establish that entrepreneurial value generation is a process and that it can be systematized (which is the essence of our Economics For Business project). A process has a beginning — in this case the identification of value potential, which requires a deep understanding of subjective value) and an end — the facilitation of value to the point where the customer can easily exchange for it, activate it, and experience it. It’s not necessarily linear, rather it’s recursive and dynamic, a continuous creative flow of knowledge gathering and learning and responding via innovation.

How are entrepreneurs compensated?

These economists realized that it represents a poor reflection of real life to identify the compensation of entrepreneurs solely with profit. On the monetary axis, they can just as well be paid in wages or dividends or other forms of monetary compensation. On the non-monetary axis, these subjectivists fully understood the concept of psychic profit: that entrepreneurs can do what they do for their own individually-perceived motivations, including achievement, fulfillment, the reward of serving others, and the purpose and meaning found via the entrepreneurial journey.

 

Additional Resources

Entrepreneurship Drives Markets, Innovation, and Value Generation (PDF): Download Here

Professor Jankovic’s Book, Mengerian Microeconomics: The Forgotten Anglo-American Contribution to the Austrian School – Buy on Amazon

The Austrian Business Model (video): https://e4epod.com/model

Start Your Own Entrepreneurial Journey

Ready to put Austrian Economics knowledge from the podcast to work for your business? Start your own entrepreneurial journey.

Enjoying The Podcast? Review, Subscribe & Listen On Your Favorite Platform:

Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify